









iis beg 
ee 


Vaihe 
“ 






















ehh varuhy ie pag yale ita 
hurl ha sae visa Salphas om 
' a Dastiirh fats 



















Hy afyatie' eee spats sith hes haber 














































alia} We) Rie dart athtyitgh a5) Api os PyAl ajo a} Mites 
be “hah oe ities pea rauioiamere ee 
fi ud Mim ureete4 TM Aenea ped sane Osby nh yoipsiiadal Ned ih 
4 aac ¥u Wide gi Bleu iusinitn Fh Spa lh hpi athe inept Ut ofp 
iNet hh peahs ye ial etal eit Pash ay Hebe alata ti N° 
iv ty 4 eae hes a algal ‘ate’! hs 3p} oy privet jaaetln: eis 
vats nV ety atin i if oe Lach vaitee, ts ‘ ast Hic af ete peti 
$3 Ponty Boi 19 } 4) Ht) PRS 4 arg ee rite ih a ere ib irae wpyo(d Apaiyenya iy 
ae ahs ai Sida bs ot st igri snail (gal) patfrg ey ih litte icine bare eld? = He 
ii D Hele aed $:5h8up Ltr se s) aint aie 9 iriirsinh aijaibasy iin ie iia amu La se Fray Hi Wgeqgiaet 
ne pene Pinkrehilatotes AS cl tetet ieosieairr i Snide nbd iy i ipo if 
ih + : Wartsherys Ve¥ay ay} 04 afyad) otha tape ty Meirescani ith Hl 
Pas 



















ay sig 


if eh a eb 
4 parka! ai aoe Y bart 
Seiirial | 


ines iy Eitan tiotinn tei pibalpait annus 

apie rene DOHA At Nid em ata ibis aes st ie 

re vic siiabeh tty ah yd) ubbrsd atte inact Heide ike 

Aes ns ine itn tt 4 fie | Luelyien cern hae te eh 
eave aircon tae tin 

Maral) Ad iia et a ae } rats " 7 sia matia rut v i iu ‘fet rhe 


Hairs dy ital) athe! is i 

be fe ey aS hanes) 4 vain MEM a ha 9 aie Poe sa - aye Hi 

mgett allt) « ieee rir ara ren bi aot Kal 

eeu ween Heiss aoa es cies 
“ 






















































































ah janie 
tase aaa) wth eet B} 9) Mued vivant 
ee Haale i i i a eas a Bs feat aes 
habits daa vet ah gl vr af Bath Hf nH tidche da aie 
! bei he airs), aah cc ris aidan A UY tata ae binanaey i 





iit 


; ae = ‘Mia 
is inugyre ia ss Debate ee aaa bie et 
nee ie ae nie ip ies yy mys i a coe 
r t # 
I adhehh na = ce i Koll I ina oY cinab esa 
iy 


ity abate ee Alas = 


a 














































i 
iy 









te. 
aah y in 


Fa 





















Ls 
pw 
y a doa 
" iad iv sa ‘buh 
ui L aa ee isha Li 
i i i Sapa Fad vel we i mots ct pie 
oae a) of Mtl dob 
ant Hs Y 4 aed ipstiatt ay ie 
EU “a Sih a\dath aii de 


Yoda ‘Vail i if 
vf oat 






be Saihe yetealts pian Pov 


hi 
i mies os 






ee 





























ettatae #41 ery 4 iy bet 
Ld oi ad 
lg Hh HL Lap BUN ae ae rue 
hedaman Sabbah Aiecda Ge 1h atestheha ie Haig shh 
fe Phi 1h ayy se shad Pee Pat Kaj abt aH ean eit Mg eit 
Mart sanivals Msg aise cit bat evel les Pr eieath aby Gidlay ae Hiatt tt ee 
3 atfa! 


Wey Wate conte alt My ee vie Erie dene bk ofa pet acho 
vite Niabap atria 






ai Hae iiss 


‘ ah, 4 set 
4 Bs sea 


ed deiahe! 34h) 





sestaatc Uptiis 


i 4 Mat ie aiietaipnies tt acest [ae 





























Bet trea et q hs pins wi att ei esa hh He ale 
jada hate 2 fe) Sibi oy “4 
Eat OM MN 

Gri} eas i 


ie pat 
¥ 


a ie i 
ig 










Awl yaa: fila , 
ae si 
ea dl a rand 
ae 
i * Swinney ire bt 
math fg sa 
Oy eae ates gay Aaa Nia hsb HF es 
9 a Sua ae Pes bue eee aetna: 
v taf} 

cit i) 


; ee Hest vat 
sta ey at ft a oo 
bieat mei ? "ial Fyanth auanedi og. 
| ee ae 
t ; fb i ita 
tee ua oh Hy Md Arts 













































at} bese fat 
{finals 
ty) a ii 





















ie 


i a a 
on ate ce | 
cas rahe He ya eee ' 










































* ava 
Nea 












































ie ine h 
ictal (iam mae i io ry) his Eu ee : 
neha coating ty ae Hit ii 

a nae mt ne ines 
ait i hah ste ay Me eae 

) aad! Linley ashen ne a A aia ils fy oie br 

ae ae in a wile a re tay ia ie ik a : 


| ri He ‘si 








mane tatichehy Avthatesitats a ee 






































loyate EA Yah raed ali hea 

Sige AA Mba aie lea th awa ay iy aa te 

nets a sie M aes aut if re! Ht on 

Wa Ru 4 alfa Eaaiyhtba A ns oulie adv j (hind Stes dabei 7 
ae rf Ay Saslinionan tate aes af 

Gee pNP oe angle ie ¥ tle a. ry 
ih yeaa nes iiis dees ae meaty ty a ; iif 
sg) yal 








nf 4 
ae sa 
veh ee gage ae <(haitaifay 


an Asia | vp) i aH foe 


ocean ae 
Heli hy aha 
aie rae = 


v 
Ss int fie ue at 


















be bul Fibs Foi Uh 
iar per dtiti i pata: 
fata avpheti * h 
‘ bake We ai aits? 
ojetbal ate ald ettyt 
rps vo i Hy 
DED bubs wall {gave 
ie airihtreth aah tli tielja 


he 
ce 











‘4 ie att Nite 
vay 


= ee oe 


itty 















a 
a 


tt 
i 





ath 
ie ie rahe 
ait i areata 
nas ae i fi anne i ce a siethnat 
i a taath iti iia inet Hh i Hi 
a 
















hh te Hilt 
iia Ke 8 oS sh te Hh ri 
eae 

Ne 







tnt 
iy inte Buty. 












Ai 
oe i te 


it any 
ioe : i oe 
iat 










i i 
eo i 





a’ aie a We hate it 
) ai : At rah i itt ne 
Bvadd tala daiieeas clans taint e 
ve neat tiga ye pte 

"i val P: ¢, tT 
saat AN ath oidiven nical 













































ies! f 
ae ma 
Lae SM Hh seu si thely go ig ie ae 
aoa Nain cd eg i 3 Mh ann Hn ee 
af 


ui nan ian f ab ey iby hae ea ca tes a ve 
















ae $e ate ich By a) 
ee bets ni: Ke ae ca He i set 
ray i iat abuts at a oe tie 
1: 


*! pipet ae 
























































a 
es 









tial 
sa the 

i Fe v yaa!) a} iki ye 

Bt a Ha NA ve fail ini aa) mh Py ttalt $ tah ; 
fet hee ve ins * istry ry * DY; ae ’ 
coon an ia ae oe HSI ates an a 
Heer seat AUR Raat aR oUMeMnate RuuRiai hey a 

os ry Vi wrest aig mht aaitysie bi ea me sy Hs) ter 
iba 


iat cF =p 

‘ite ries Hi sei Vichehaiate iat 
( aly Ht thai Mis aba 
a ae 4 i 


hae 


hs Thahfaibl und 
, ASLAM DLA at oe ba sha he Mh bette te hal font) alo Piha ‘it 
rh res k vibe Petar Pianeta te ae 
cyan mech peti og ho Padhieddael hg ath aha atpatbalbi 
AF talon i zuma bothatneitedleNa CMe nba huge 
3 (haath Sho ee PATS Cah a afi afhirl Vitel Dah si ad) tal) Rete needs 
phates haan i hed avin Paid Pat beat 
pea} oP adsl AK et cake niente us oats) yeh ane 
Letty has vold a ty¥it Li hen pelt athe! ital co tit 
er ae parr enya HaNmMD Yel df ¥ Sasa Bt $ahet Waa th haha Aad 
may Shep all a1 ab DNL oh vita ipa teitelva dat! A Roe fa alf: aitsth adn aitothe bet he's] Ba tha ater} 
ae Utama? 44 ifp ils ie Saiigaa ty altd ellen at ett AGA iy acta tts tks tte! ny Y ans 
pe hatha ei berivy. vet Hi AR ¥ porate 


he 

‘be fal 

deer hand i 

Yada theholie® ally Po 
ern irs at ret 
Ae GARR «Via 

NE ee 54 Dhar beet » Pha 

Al Otide oe paade® Hay hy 


abated gh ther 
Ba Fea Ysa it tha f 
ME Hala 
th 




































ir ia Na tps tt 
i ian Hi aia af ws Metite 
¥ 


atyalfaly 


un oe sa iinas 




























wt 













a 


poe belt 





























CA 9 t Aaiafeeds Gee aaageetred aya 4 
Heh the gol . Aeinihit iis sla ied) debe thar replat cam ve ryt ici 
HY pa Dele: 'Ga 2s New MaGe Gan! telk aia es fae tea a sash ihn at) ahayui 
9 Ne aMha iach dt ft 





Hepat = asia i eae 


ht srligasy 


| vere pat 













bY p 
ri anh ‘ 
i 7 ' I 
wi M A 
NB Fl 
tty 
bid) 
v 
Ly fou t 
hi i} i EU Lee Cape, 
vi Hy ba ur EPA 4 ow t 3 i FUG Re {ye 
EY SS eT a” j 
1 f 
: 
* r 
aa 






‘in 1 2028 Ww 


ton Th ological a 


Ww 


vith, ar 












Great Preachers 


As Seen By a Journalist 


(Y 
oe & i’ 
way OF | 






oi 
wn ws 
By // dy 
i 4 - £*# by 
As 


LOGICAL SEM 
WILLIAM G. SHEPHERD ioellada 
Author of “The Scar That Tripled,”’ Ete. 





New York CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LONDON AND EpINBURGH 


Copyright, 1924, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


Printed in United Siates of America. 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 


To My Mother 





Foreword 


Y profession the author is a reporter. 
His work has constantly appeared in 
American magazines of all types. It 
was because of his reportorial experiences and 
his knack, perhaps, of being able to observe and 
analyse American institutions, that he was re- 
quested by Rae D. Henkle, the editor of The 
Christian Herald, to meet and interview eleven 
of the leading clergymen of the United States. 
These clergymen were selected both for their 
great reputations as preachers and for the 
power of their influence in their various de- 
nominations. They were also carefully selected 
for the variety of their positions and tasks in 
American Protestantism. No two of these 
men, it will be observed, fill exactly the same 
niche in the work of the churches of this coun- 
try. Indeed, each man seems, more or less, to 
have carved out for himself, his own niche, to 
have found certain peculiar duties for which, by 
temperament and character, he was best fitted. 
Each man, more or less, has made his 

own job. 
It is true, of course, that these eleven men do 

5 


6 FOREWORD 


not constitute the eleven greatest clergymen in 
the United States. It is possible perhaps that 
another eleven might have been selected, or even 
a third eleven, that might have numbered great 
and eminent ministers. The purpose of the 
selection was to find eleven leading preachers 
who, in their work, their purposes, their beliefs 
and their influence, might show America a fair 
cross-section of pulpit-life and pulpit-work in 
this country. 

These eleven men, however, are not average 
clergymen. ‘They are all men of distinctive 
power and leadership. Some of them studied 
at several universities. ‘Two were at Yale, two 
at Columbia, one at the University of Chicago, 
and one at the University of London. Three 
were students of the Boston University; two of 
Wesleyan University, in Ohio; one each at 
Syracuse University, Mercer University, of 
Georgia; Wesleyan University, Connecticut; 
Amherst, Kenyon and Midland Colleges. 

Only half of the group, however, attended 
theological schools. They went into the pulpit 
at the average age of twenty-eight years. At 
the time of writing they had served an average 
of thirty-two years in the pulpit. 

How many millions of hearers and readers 
these men have reached cannot easily be com- 
puted. It is amazing to discover that these 


FOREWORD 7 


eleven men have written one hundred and 
twenty books, an average of a full dozen vol- 
umes for each man. 

Every man of them has been a church 
builder. ‘The architecture of great cities like 
New York, Philadelphia and Chicago has been 
graced by the life-work of these men and in 
smaller cities there stand a full score of 
churches that have been built by these great 
preachers. 

It isn’t a small thing to be a preacher, when 
you consider such preachers as these. Their 
influence on the life about them may be silent 
but it is incalculable. 

No man on the street, in America, who looks 
into the work and activities of American 
clergymen as this secular writer and reporter 
has looked into the work of this handful of 
men can say truthfully that clergymen do not 
play a powerful influence in American life. 

| W.G. S. 
New Vork, N. Y. 


i, 
\ 
hf 


he 
iM | 


Lait 


wit 
i 





VIII. 


. CHRISTIAN F, REISNER 


. BisHop Francis J. McConNneELL 


. RussELL H. ConweELs 


Contents 


. Davip JAMES BuRRELL 


A Champion for Christ 


. Harry Emerson Fospick 


A Preacher Who Reaches the H Sart 
Through the Brain. 


. JOHN TIMOTHY STONE 


A Business Man in Religion 


. BisHop CuHaryEs Davin WIL- 


LIAMS . 


A Man Who Thought the Sharch 
Was Not a Cyclone-Cellar 


. JoHN RoacH STRATON 


An “ Old-Time Religionist” 


. S. ParKEs CADMAN 


The Preacher Who “ Knows” 


An Exponent of Religious Adver- 
tising 
CHARLES E, JEFFERSON 


An Orator Who Preaches to the 
Heart 


A Bishop Who Aims to Christianise 
Institutions 


America’s Amazing Man 
. G. CampBety Morcan 
A Knight Fighting for the Bible 


9 


13 
Mahe 


41 


55 


Al 
85 


1 LOL 


8 


vibe 


ya bebe 
EAS 


am PALE. La 
Sart. 





if 


DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


A CHAMPION FOR CHRIST 


ifs is science that is playing havoc with what is 
called the old-time religion. As I talked with the 
various clergymen who are mentioned in this book 
I discovered that the struggle between the funda- 
mentalists and the modernists is a struggle over the 
question of whether or not theology shall recognise 
the discoveries and theories of science. 

“Theology can, and ought to be, adapted to pres- 
ent-day science,” say the modernists. 

“Present-day science, with its theories—particu- 
larly with its theory of evolution—ought not to be 
recognised by theology,” say the fundamentalists. 

David James Burrell I found to be a rock-like 
fundamentalist. He is aggressively against any 
attempt to adjust theology or religion to the dis- 
coveries or theories of science. To him Christianity 
needs no explaining nor modification. 

He takes the Bible as a supernatural, Divine reve- 
lation to men; he is as sound a representative of the 
fundamentalist school as I encountered. 


I 
DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


BROKEN, filthy, drunkard of a man 
found his way into the study of one of 
the country’s greatest churches, a mag- 

nificent pile of stone that stands in Fifth Ave- 
nue, at the corner of Twenty-ninth Street, in 
the city of New York. Life had befuddled 
him, but one thing was clear in his hazy mind. 
It was that in this rich and stately church 
there was a man who could help him. He had 
known this man a third of a century before, in 
better days. 

The two men came together—the pastor of 
the great church and the broken man. Their 
first conversation ran about like this: 

“I’m just as you see me,” said the broken 
one. 

“You need help,” said the other. He gave 
the man money for food and clothes and then 
he heard the story of the wrecked life. 

The next Sunday the wrecked man sat in a 
far-away seat in the great church. He was 
with the crowd that came to hear the preacher’s 


13 


14 DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


sermon that day. On later Sundays he came 
early to get a seat that would bring him near 
to the great preacher. 

For six months, so the preacher has told me, 
this man sat below him, with upraised face, 
listening to every word, and, at the end of that 
time, the man came into his study and said: 
“Dr. Burrell, I want to take the communion 
and join your church.” 

And within a few weeks the once broken 
man took part in the communion and stood 
before the congregation to be admitted to mem- 
bership in the famous and rich old Marble Col- 
legiate Reformed Church. 

And then—the man disappeared. The 
preacher and many members of the congrega- 
tion missed him, but he never walked those 
aisles again. 


Two years later Dr. Burrell received a tele- 
phone call in his Fifth Avenue study from the 
Hadley Rescue Hall in the Bowery. 

“Dr. Burrell,” said John Callahan, the head 
of the famous Mission, “can’t you come 
down here this evening and conduct a fu- 
neral? The man who is dead said he knew 
you very well.”’ 

When Dr. Burrell entered the Mission that 
evening its seats were filled. Before the plat- 


CHAMPION FOR CHRIST 15 


form stood a casket and as Dr. Burrell looked 
at the face, he exclaimed to John Callahan: 
“ Billy!’ What’s he been up to, John? How 
did you find him? How did he come down 
here to the Mission? ” 

“ He came down here with his face shining,” 
answered Callahan. ‘‘ We didn’t find him. He 
found us. Billy isn’t one of those picked off 
the streets. The night after you took him into 
your church he came here, and he’s been here 
ever since. He patrolled the water-front to 
find down-and-out men. And he _ found 
them. They’ll tell us about it themselves, this 
evening.” 

The greater part of the funeral service con- 
sisted of the tributes of men whose paths had 
crossed Billy’s. He seemed to have left a 
blessing wherever he moved. The landlady in 
the water-front boarding-house where Billy had 
lived stood up with her beaming face covered 
with tears. 

“He taught God to me and to every man in 
the house. My house became full of Christians 
after Billy came there.” 

That old boarding-house on the water-front! 
It must have been one of the happiest places in 
the big city. Billy had brought God to it, and 
out of it nightly went Billy, the landlady and 
the boarders to hunt for broken men and show 


16 DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


them how they might become whole again. 
Man after man arose in the audience and with 
happy but streaming face told of what Billy, 
the longshoreman, had done for him. Billy had 
earned his daily bread beside them and all 
around him, as he worked, there had been a 
circle of song and happiness and prayer; he had 
held up a cross before them. 

The great preacher sat there in the Mission 
with his head bowed. ‘The motto of this 
preacher’s life had been the words of Christ: 
“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will 
draw all men unto me.” 

And Billy, on the water-front, had followed 
the example of the pastor in the stately church 
on Fifth Avenue. 

“In all my life,’ Dr. Burrell told me recently, 
“| have never asked a man or woman to come 
to church or to join the church. I have stood 
on my platform and told the truth to all who 
came. I held Him before them, because I knew 
that power came from Him, not from me.” 

We Americans like rock-like men. They are 
our really great men. They are men who stand 
solidly. Waves do not overturn them. Indeed, 
such men are the makers of waves; the tides 
that beat against them break away from their 
sides into great waves that end in roaring surf 
on the other side of the earth. We like rock- 


CHAMPION FOR CHRIST 17 


like men in science, in finance, in politics, in 
discovery and in business. 

David James Burrell is a rock-like man in the 
Christianity of America. He reminded me of 
a great stone, set in a certain place, to hold a 
great burden. His square, chiseled face, his 
broad shoulders and his medium stature gave 
me a sense of his solidity; the grayness that 
comes of his eighty years gave me an impres- 
sion of the hoariness that settles, through cen- 
turies, on an immovable stone. 

And yet, as we talked he told me that he was 
a religious fanatic. 

“T don’t believe in taking Christianity half- 
way, he said to me. “If Christianity is not 
good for every day in the year and for every 
minute in the day; if it isn’t good in business 
as well as in church; if it doesn’t make a 
burdened man or woman happier and hope- 
ful and a business man honest and clean- 
conscienced, then I don’t want anything more 
to do with it. But it does. I know it does. 
For over half a century I have proved that 
it does. 

“Christ? How can any one analyse Him? 
He was the Son of the living God. I have 
taken Him for that. I preach Him as that. He 
was supernatural. He was beyond our reason 
and our brains. Only faith can reach Him. 


18 DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


You can tell everybody that that is what I be- 
lieve and I believe in it with all my might. 1 
am against all this present-day explanation of 
Christ. He can’t be explained, except by the 
fact that He was the Son of God. 

“Do you remember the policemen who were 
sent out to afrest Him? ‘They walked out from 
the court bravely enough. But they came back 
into the court without their prisoner. Their 
report was the strangest police report ever made 
in any city in the world. All they had to say 
was: “ Never man spake like this man.”’ “ No, 
sir!” said the gray-haired preacher, “ He can 
not be analysed or explained by human beings. 
He was the Son of God.” 

And then he continued: 

“Why, we only have a few words of His 
sermons. They were very short sermons. And 
yet they touched on every problem of human 
life. His words set the world to thinking and 
His sermons marked an epoch in human his- 
tory. And some try to tell us that He was only 
a man.” 

There you have, in this great pastor’s words, 
what he believes. He is for the old faith; the 
new ideas that would sweep it away do not 
move him. 

In that great church on Fifth Avenue, when 
he came to it, thirty years ago, were millions in 


CHAMPION FOR CHRIST 19 


wealth and property but only one hundred and 
fifteen members and less than ten prayer- 
meeting attendants. Now great congregations 
gather every Sunday to hear Dr. David James 
Burrell tell simply of the old faith. 

“Did this rock of a Burrell ever move with 
the waves’ ”’ I asked myself, as he spoke. 

He did. He was a shifting sandpile, once. 
He told me all about it. 

“When I was graduated from Yale,’ he 
said, “and went to my home in Illinois where 
my parents had raised me in the Indian days, 
my mother met me at the gate and threw her 
arms around me and cried with joy and said, 
“Now, David, youll go into the ministry, 
won't you?’ : 

“T couldn’t answer her. I told her I would 
go to a theological seminary and see what they 
had to give me. In the university I had lost 
all the religion she had taught me. I had for- 
gotten how to pray. I couldn’t believe in the 
divinity of Christ. I hadn’t any belief. But I 
went off to the seminary. I couldn’t get any- 
thing there; it was all dogma and _ theory. 
There was no living Christ in it, that I could 
reach. To keep myself going I took charge of 
a boys’ mission class near Washington Square 
in New York City. I told them how to keep 
clean, how to save their money; I told them 


20 DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


they must not steal, that they must try to be 
good citizens. But I couldn't tell them any- 
thing about Christ. 1 couldn't even pray 
with them. 

“ One night a boy came to my room and told 
me his father was dying. ‘Won't you come 
with me?’ hé asked. I had to go. I had never 
seen a man die; I had never been at a death-bed. 
I had no comfort to give to a dying man, but I 
had to go. Ina tiny, dirty room of a tenement 
in the near-by slums the boy showed me his 
father, lying on a ragged bed. Thenbegan a 
night of lies. 

“¢ Are you a parson?” asked the man. 

“T had to lie and tell him I was,” said Dr. 
Burrell. “I couldn’t see anything else to do. 

“ «Very well,’ said the man. * I’m a Scotch- 
man. I was raised in the Kirk of Scotland. I 
know just as much about the Bible as any par- 
son. But I’m dying and I want you to tell me 
that the Bible is true, before I die. I want you 
to tell me that I can believe in every word of it 
and that all my old mother taught me was 
right.’ 

“ And then he asked me if I believed in the 
Bible. I had to lie again. I told him I did. I 
told him I believed that Christ was Divine. 
I told him I believed in every word in the 
Bible. 


CHAMPION FOR CHRIST 21 


“And then he quoted verses to me. ‘Do 
you believe that, parson?’ he would ask me. 
And I would have to answer yes. ‘ Well, make 
me believe it then, he would say. And I, not 
believing it at all, would do my best to help him 
believe it. Verse after verse he quoted to me. 
Now and then he would say, ‘I’m slippin’ 
away, parson. I want you to make me believe. 
I’ve wrecked everything around me in my life, 
and myself, too, because I couldn’t believe.’ 

“We talked and talked and talked,’ Dr. 
Burrell went on, “ while the boy listened. The 
man’s eyes began to glaze. It was a terrible 
night; the most terrible of my life. About 
four o'clock in the morning, when the early 
noises of the city began to enter the room, he 
said to me, ‘ Parson, I’m slippin’ away fast. 
Can’t you make me believe?’ 

“I tried to talk to him again and finally he 
said, “ Parson, come over here to my bed and 
pray for me. I’m almost gone.’ 

“T knelt down at his bed and I prayed and 
prayed. I tried to talk to God on that dying 
man’s behalf. And while I prayed the man 
died.” | 

It was then and there, in that room, that 
David James Burrell’s life took the turn that 
led him to a position of power and authority 
in American Protestantism. 


22 DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


The ring of Dr. Burrell’s voice as he told 
me of the decision he made in that tenement- 
room, at the bedside of the dead man who 
had tried so hard to peas Ill remember 
through life. 

“ 1 decided then and there,” he said, “ that J 
would believe. I resolved to take the Bible, 
word for word, without any questioning, and 
put my faith in every word. I determined to 
become a fanatic for Christ. And I have been 
a fanatic ever since.” 

He tossed away dogma and ecclesiasticism. 
He and his wife went into the slums of Chicago 
and started a city mission. She played a street 
organ and sang while he preached before the 
crowds, a “ fanatic for Christ.” It was a far 
cry, his street mission, from the grand pulpit 
that a graduate of Yale might have hoped to 
fill. It was into a strange life that his bride of 
a year followed him. For four years they 
worked together on the streets of Chicago. 
For forty-eight years they lived side by side 
until she died. 

At his ordination, when certain of the sage 
ministers of the sort who thought they had 
“explained Christ,” began to ask Burrell tech- 
nical and dogmatic questions he had arisen 
from his chair and started to leave the room. 
He had said to them all, “I don’t have to be 


CHAMPION FOR CHRIST 23 


here answering questions. If this is what ordi- 
nation means, I’m through with it.” 

Only a white-haired old clergyman, who had 
been the young man’s friend through his wan- 
dering years, prevented him from leaving the 
room. I know from facts that when Dr. Bur- 
rell finally entered the Church, the Church came 
to him and took him, with all his “ fanaticism 
for Christ ” and with all his belligerency against 
men, scientists or preachers, who attempted to 
“explain Christ.”” He went first to the Second 
Presbyterian church in Dubuque, Iowa, and re- 
mained there eleven years, a power in religious 
and civil life. Westminster Church, of Minne- 
apolis, then called him, in 1891. In the mighty 
surging growth of that Western city Dr. Bur- 
rell and his church kept well abreast; the con- 
gregation numbered two thousand. His church 
was always overflowing. 

And then New York called him—the old 
Marble Collegiate Church, part of the oldest 
Protestant church on the American continent 
with a continuous history. 

“T don’t want to go,” he told his callers. 
They asked him to meet the official board and 
he finally agreed. 

In the board meeting he said, “ I’d rather be 
in Minneapolis. ‘Tell me whether I’ll be free 
here to do as I wish? ” 3 


24 DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


There was a hemming and a hawing among 
some of the elder men. 

One man said, ““ We have some sweet and 
ancient customs in our dear old church. We 
hope you won't suggest overturning them.” 

That was the time for the man from the 
West, the “fanatic for Christ,” to speak. 

“For over a hundred years,” he answered, 
“you have had these sweet old customs. And 
see where they have brought your church. If I 
come here I shall have to overturn everything; 
I must do as I see best.” 

And so that dignified old New York church 
board took him on his own terms. That year 
they spent twenty-five thousand dollars on the 
church to prepare it. Out went the old pulpit 
and in its place came a great platform. The 
sacred rights of family pew-owners were 
knocked into a cocked hat. If owners didn’t fill 
their rented pews then some one else—common 
folks from the highways and byways of the city 
—might fill them. 

New life came into the old church and it has 
been there for thirty years now. Hundreds of 
thousands of people in that church, have seen 
Christ lifted up on that platform; but never one 
single word, attempting to “explain” Christ, 
has ever gone out from that platform. Many 
sermons preached by Dr. Burrell are printed 


CHAMPION FOR CHRIST 25 


and go through the mails to thousands. Dr. 
Burrell has written forty books up to now. In 
every book there is his “ fanaticism for Christ.” 
He is a member of over thirty boards of various 
sorts in New York; he is a massive figure in 
the civic life of the city. 

When a man among men such as David 
James Burrell slams his square hand down on 
the Bible and says, “I believe in this Book from 
cover to cover and I stand by every word in it 
because it teaches all men how to live,” you 
walk from his study out into Fifth Avenue and 
into the busy streets of the great city, feeling, 
in your heart of hearts, that if Christ had been 
human, like these passing things, men would 
have forgotten Him centuries ago. 

Perhaps the old Scotchman died unbelieving 
in that tenement room, half a century ago. But 
if I were dying I would rather have beside me 
the gnarled old “ fanatic for Christ,’ Burrell, 
than all the clerical savants that have ever writ- 
ten or spoken in America in attempts to “ ex- 
plain Christ.” 

Whether the preachers of America know it 
or not, we men of the street for whom I speak 
—the women of the homes—we Americans— 
want a Christ who is Divine. And when a 
preacher cannot point us toward a Divine 
Christ and beliefs to which we can anchor, his 


26 DAVID JAMES BURRELL 


church is empty, and all the other little things 
he may have to offer to us will not fill it. And 
this is truer today than it ever was before; we 
have come almost to the tag end of the “ other 
little things.” 

That’s what talking to Burrell makes you 
feel and know. 


{I 


HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 


f 
i 
f 
: 


i 
F 


A PREACHER WHO REACHES THE HEART 
THROUGH THE BRAIN 


OUNG men and women who go through our 
universities and are able to hold on to their 
religion are, I am persuaded, marked exceptions to 
a rule. This rule would seem to run as follows: 
“In the university you lose your religion; if you 
get it back again you do so after you have left the 
university and have gone out into the world again.” 
It was almost a common experience with the 
eleven clergymen with whom I talked; in school, as 
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick expressed it, every 
man, more or less, “lost the grip on the spiritual 
part” of himself. The late Bishop Charles David 
Williams said laughingly, of his experience at 
school, “Oh, yes! I had the usual dose of spiritual 
measles in my science classes.” 

“ Spiritual measles ” is a common school disease. 
These clergymen survived it. But their general ex- 
perience suggests this question: How many spiritual 
casualties are there in the laboratories and class 
rooms of our universities? When cold knowledge 
and exact science crush the emotions, spiritual life 
may cease. It seemed to me, as an onlooking re- 
porter, that there might well be a big place in the 
church for a man like Fosdick, who lays tremen- 
dous emphasis on the intellectual appeal of religion. 


IT 
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 


F I were a boy in an American college or 

| university who felt his mother’s religion 
slipping away from him; if I, in the hght 

of much learning, got to wondering if all the 
“Now I lay me’s”’ she had heard me say at her 
knee had been said into unhearing space; if I 
were puzzled as to whether the good Lord to 
whom she used to kneel in my behalf, was only 
a myth and not a God of power; if all the 
shore-lights that she had pointed out to me in 
my days of childhood had begun to grow dim 
to me and show promise of fading out of my 
sight; if the anchor of my mother’s belief to 
which I had in simpler days fastened my faith, 
seemed, to my mind, to be dragging in the 
sea-flow of life; if my religious emotions, so 
vivid in younger days, seemed dead within me, 
and if my mind, now trained to analysis and 
logic, kept picking away ruthlessly at the 
“ Rock of Ages,” and bringing me reports that 
the “ Rock ” was only a vision and not a refuge 
in a storm of life, I should seek out, if I could, 


29 


30 HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 


some man who could restore my belief, not by 
appealing to my emotions but to my intelligence 
and brain. And if I came upon such a man as 
Harry Emerson Fosdick, I would sit at his feet 
and listen. 

I say that I would do this under such circum- 
stances because young men, so puzzled, do sit at 
the feet of this preacher of New York and 
under his guidance they do find all the faith of 
the old days coming back to them, oftentimes 
stronger than ever, because of the very mental 
testing which this faith has had. 

Up and down the long front of Christianity 
the roughest spot on the firing-line, perhaps, is 
in our universities and colleges. As Dr. Fos- 
dick said to me in the course of a conversation: 
“Tt is need that brings us to religion for help. 
Sin and its consequences create a need. Trag- 
edy, like sickness, invalidism or death, creates 
a need. Mental suffering, growing, perhaps, 
out of the loss of old ideals and faiths, creates a 
need. ‘This mental suffering may be as acute 
and as terrible as any pain that man may ever 
be called upon to endure. ‘The need it creates 
can be met by the Christian religion as definitely 
as any other need.” 

It is easy to draw a simple picture that makes 
this puzzled youth stand out before us in all his 
pathos. A man who has tasted all the dregs of 


TO HEART VIA BRAIN 31 


life, battered and broken, has a desperate phys- 
ical as well as spiritual need for religious faith; 
no mental questions stand in his way. Behind 
him is a life utterly broken; before him, unless 
he can summon his faith, is indescribable trag- 
edy. The very ghastliness of his plight is 
his aid. 

Men and women, fathers and mothers, facing 
problems of life, seemingly too great to bear, 
have needs so definite and apparently so over- 
whelming that the invitation to consider asking 
aid of a Helper comes like a great relief. 

But tragedy lies in our universities and col- 
leges today in the minds of youths who, because 
of their very training, find themselves facing 
life with a disappearing faith in the religion 
of their fathers. Their mental need is as 
great as the physical need of the “ down-and- 
outer’’ on the streets of our great cities or 
the almost helpless distracted fathers and 
mothers in American homes besieged by pov- 
erty, sin or tragedy. 

To aid the “ down-and-outer”’ there are the 
Rescue Missions like the Bowery Mission and 
other famous missions in America. To bring 
faith into besieged homes, there is the pastor 
of the community church, who must himself, 
if he can be of any aid, have followed, or 
even be in the very act of following, the very 


32 HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 


trail of trial which the family folks of his com- 
munity are treading. 

Talk as you will about sermons and practical 
advice, we folks in our religious besetments 
listen only to the man who knows what he’s 
talking about. 

And so I asked Dr. Fosdick, special friend to 
_ those whose intellectuality stands in the way of 
faith, to tell me how he, personally, had won 
his commission of missionary to these be- 
wildered people. 

He smiled, happily, confidentially. I’ve seen 
the same smile on the face of Brother Perkins, 
at Red Rock Methodist Camp meeting, as he 
shouted to the little group of the faithful at the 
Sunday morning “love feast” that old-time 
refrain: “ ‘The old-time religion is good enough 
for me.” 

“When I was seven years old,” he told me, 
sitting in his office in the famous old First 
Presbyterian Church at Fifth Avenue and 
Eleventh Street, New York, “ I was converted.” 

“Old-fashioned conversion?” I asked. 
Somehow, from what I had heard of him, both 
criticism and praise, I had not expected to hear 
him speak in the old-fashioned terms. I had 
approached him knowing full well that he holds 
a chair in the Union Theological Seminary in 
New York, and that battles of theology and 


TO HEART VIA BRAIN 33 


ecclesiasticism are continually surging round 
him while he swings a dangerous fist. It’s true 
—a “new-fangled religion”? was what I had 
expected from him—him with that silk-hatted 
congregation in Fifth Avenue—him with his 
hand in modern new-fangled uplift movements, 
him with his established reputation in the intel- 
lectual, social and business world of the cos- 
mopolis for possessing as choice a set of easy- 
running, clear-cutting brains as any man can 
have. 

“Yes, sir!” he answered. “ Old-fashioned 
conversion, if you want to call it that, though it 
isn’t old-fashioned at all, and never will be. 

“It was a tremendous emotional experience 
and it has directed my whole life. 

‘““T lived in an intellectual home; my father 
and mother were devout Christians and I lived 
a childhood in which not a single doubt en- 
tered. My father was a teacher. He is alive 
today, principal of a high school in Buffalo, 
New York. 

“T intended to be a professional man. I 
went to Colgate University and then I found 
myself beginning to doubt all that I had been 
taught and all that I had experienced in 
religion. 

“It was a terrible thing to feel myself losing 
the faith I had possessed. Morally, because of 


34 HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 


my home-training, I kept on solid ground. I 
held to my morality, but I lost my grip on the 
spiritual part of myself.” 

“ And if you had lost your grip morally, as 
well?’ I suggested. 

“TI would have been gone,” he said, simply. 
“Tf I had had a moral complication at that 
time, as well as a spiritual one, I’m afraid, as I 
look back at it now, that I couldn’t have held 
my own. 

“That’s the tragedy of the lives of our 
youth,” he said, “losses in moral ground that | 
are hard to regain. Do you know that there 
never was a man saved in the Jerry McAuley 
Mission who didn’t testify afterwards that he 
had had ‘a good mother’? A good mother and 
a good home put something into a young man 
that stays with him through his whole life. He 
can never get entirely away from it. 

“It’s so hard’ in life for a young man who 
never in his boyhood’s home heard of Christ! 
He has to build himself up from the very 
bottom. | 

“Because I was able to hold my moral 
ground I was able to fight out the battle of 
faith. I left the hill of my old faith, went down 
into the valley of doubt and then climbed away 
up to loftier heights of positive faith on the 
other side of the valley. 


TO HEART VIA BRAIN 35 


“T couldn’t go into the law or any other 
profession except the ministry. 

“There seemed to be a compass within me 
that turned toward religious faith and religious 
effort. No matter how I seized the needle, the 
instant I removed the influence of my will from 
it, it would always swing back to that same 
direction. 

“Do you know Dwight Moody’s story about 
the child whose hand was caught in the neck 
of a vase?’ 

““T’m caught,’ the child said to Moody ina 
home where he was a guest. 

1. tried my best to get the child ireey 
Moody used to say, ‘but I couldn't. Then I 
saw that the child’s fist was doubled. What 
have you got in your hand?’ asked Moody. 

“*“A penny,’ said the child. ‘I dropped it 
in the vase.’ 

“Tet go! Let go of it!’ said Moody. 

“And the child was free in a second. 

“So I let go at last my struggle against 
the ministry, and I have had a great life ever 
since. 

“Tn my religion I believe in God, manifested © 
in His Son, Jesus Christ. I think that all the 
other issues that arise between creeds and lead- 
ers are, in face of the fact, too small for dis- 
cussion. Because I will not debate the question © 


36 HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 


of the Virgin Birth, nor count it important, be- 
cause I say that any Conception of Christ must 
have been divine, I am attacked in certain cir- 
cles as a heretic. What I am trying to teach is 
not one theory or another of Jesus’ earthly 
origin, but that Christ was the Son of God, 
come into the world to save sinners. ‘That is 
the great and one outstanding fact which con- 
stitutes the center of the Gospel.” 

The question I had raised about “ old- 
fashioned conversion” brought this from Dr. 
Fosdick : 

“We may be converted to many things, good 
and bad. It was upon the convertibility of men 
that Christ supremely laid His hand. He knew 
they could be converted to good.” 

“ But conversion, in the ‘ old-time religion,’ ”’ 
I suggested, “ was a matter of the emotions.” 

“Yes! Yes!’ agreed this teacher-preacher. 
“Tt is a matter of the emotions almost always. 
When men and women are in great sorrow and 
distress their emotions are easy to reach. With 
many of us the mind does not stand in the way 
of the emotions, but with the young men in the 
universities who find their faiths faltering, it is 
necessary to reach their emotions through a 
thick fortress of mind, and through the emo- 
tions, reach the will power. 

“Through the mind to the emotions, and 


TO HEART VIA BRAIN 87 


through the emotions to the will,’ he repeated, 
as if to impress upon me a formula. 

I haven’t written this for or against Fosdick, 
the preaching pastor of the First Presbyterian 
Church, from the doors of which crowds are 
turned away when he preaches. I haven’t writ- 
ten it for or against Fosdick, who lectures on 
“The Modern Use of the Bible” in his chair 
at the Union Theological Seminary in New 
York City. 

I went to see him as a man playing a big 
part in life and in his profession. 

Some time after I had talked with him, he 
amazed America with the boldness of his 
declaration that he would not join the Presby- 
terian Church in order to maintain the right to 
preach from the pulpit of the First Presbyteran 
Church. But he did only what those who knew 
him expected him to do. The work of a man 
like Fosdick is to be done not in one church or 
one denomination but everywhere, for puzzled 
youth is everywhere, and tired brains that need 
help in the struggle toward goodness—where 
are they not? The crash of the Fosdick 
incident makes the world stop and look and 
wonder. But to my mind it is only the noise 
of the falling of another interdenominational 
partition. 

A Christian missionary in the wilderness of 


38 HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 


bleak intellectuality, driving his belief in a Di- 
vine Christ through barriers of mind until it 
penetrates fathoms deep to the thought-bur- 
dened human emotions—that’s Fosdick to me. 

He is forty-two now, round-faced, clear- 
eyed, ruggedly hewn in features. I tried to 
picture him at sixty, his shocky hair turned 
grey, the smoothness of his features marked by 
lines of ever-growing character that come to the 
face of every man who meets the problem of 
life four-square, and fighting. 

I wanted to see how he would appear to my 
boys when they are grown. I hope when they 
need help they will be able to find a man like 
him somewhere very nearby. 

And he tells me, this man that I had thought 
a highfaluting college professor, dissector and 
analyser of religion, more psychologist than 
prophet, that I must begin to raise now the 
fortifications of my sons’ souls in the heart of 
our home. | 

Even I, who went to him asa reporter, got a 
message from him. 

I left Fosdick feeling that he had seen me as 
a soul; that he sees all men that way. 

And that, I submit, is the test. 


III 
JOHN TIMOTHY STONE 


A BUSINESS MAN IN RELIGION 


THE American Protestant Church, as a business 
institution, is more than a billion dollar business. 

The man who scorns business as a church activity 
does not know what he is talking about. Forty-two 
million Americans worship in one-fifth of a million 
edifices, which have a value, taken with incidental 
property, of one and two-third billions of dollars. 

But—these forty-two million church members, it 
would seem, have something to do beside attending 
church. There is work to do. David Lloyd George, 
the British statesman, said: “Churches ought to be 
like a searchlight turned on all slums to expose, to 
shame those in authority to do something. What 
does poverty mean? It means, men have not enough 
to purchase the barest necessities of life for them- 
selves and their children. The task our Master came 
here for was to lift the needy from the mire and the 
poor from the dunghill, and it is the Christian 
Church alone, that can accomplish it.” There are 
perhaps fifty-eight million adults to be drawn into 
the churches. There are about thirty million chil- 
dren in America who have no religious instruction 
of any sort. Over half of our clergymen receive 
less than two thousand dollars a year in salaries. 
There is plenty of business for the Church to carry 
out, and for this the Church needs business men. 

John Timothy Stone, even in the pulpit, has exer- 
cised his business talents. . 

It was a good sign that the Church found room 
in its midst and a place in which to work, for John 
Timothy Stone. 


Ill 
JOHN TIMOTHY STONE 


HE Devil met one of his local subordi- 
nates on the street of an American city 
not long ago and said to him, “ Well, 

how are things getting along in this town?” 

“For the first time since I’ve been stationed 
here,’ said the sub-devil, “they’re looking 
pretty badly.” 

“What’s the matter? ” 

“ See that fellow across the street? ”’ 

“Yes. What about him? ” 

“Well, in some way he has got hold of a 
grain of real, undiluted, concentrated truth. 
That grain of truth is like a deadly bomb. If 
he uses it rightly he can blow up our whole 
business here.” 

The Devil looked carefully at the man on the 
opposite sidewalk. 

“Til tell you how to handle him,” he 
said. “You tempt him to take that grain 
of truth and organise it. Make it the basis 
of some kind of a society or lodge or club. 
Then he'll spend his time running the club 

41 
» 


42 JOHN TIMOTHY STONE 


and he won't have any time to use the truth 
against us.”’ ) 

From the latest reports I hear that the man 
yielded to the temptation and that the Devil’s 
plan is working beautifully. The grain of 
truth, which is the nucleus of the organisation 
which he founded, lies in a glass case, unused, 
in a corner of the gentleman’s office in the build- 
ing which the new organisation erected. Some 
day the man who found it may take it out and 
use it; but just now he’s too busy taking care of 
his organisation to do any extra work. 

If an organiser isn’t a big man, he’s lost. An 
organiser, if he is a little man, puts an institu- 
tion of some kind together and doesn’t care 
whether the institution achieves anything in the 
world or not, just so long as he gets the insti- 
tution built. He is like a man who assembles 
an automobile, without caring whether it will 
ever run, just so he gets the parts together; like 
a man who builds a railroad locomotive and is 
happy if it can pull itself along the rails, even, 
though it does stand dead still if you hook a 
freight car to it. : 

Being an organiser is about as dangerous a 
job as a man can have. In the business world, 
in recent months, our leaders in industry have 
begun to try to tear down some of the organis- 
ing that has been done in the past decade. 


BUSINESS IN RELIGION 43 


They say there was too much of it; it was 
done, only too often, by short-visioned men; 
it brought an inhuman element into industry, 
and left out the personal element. Effort that 
should have been spent in production was spent 
in following organisation rules. 

The small-minded organiser is being kicked 
out of the business world. His motto was: 
“See how well my organisation runs.” 

The great-minded, far-visioned organiser is 
being sought everywhere. His motto is: “ See 
what my organisation accomplishes.” 

When you meet an organiser, as I met John 
Timothy Stone, of Chicago’s famous Fourth 
Presbyterian Church, listen closely to his talk. 
He'll do one of two things: 

(1) Tell you about what he has organised; 
how smoothly the wheels of his organisations 
go ’round; how much money it costs to keep 
them going. 

If he talks that way, put him down as a 
little man. 

(2) Tell you what he is accomplishing, and 
force you to ask him questions about how he 
does these things; about the tools he uses, the 
organisations he requires. 

If he does that, put him down as that rare, 


rare man, a good organiser who has cheated 
the Devil. 


4A JOHN TIMOTHY STONE 


There are many photographs that Dr. John 
Timothy Stone might have on the wall of the 
den where he studies—photographs of that 
beautiful group of church buildings along Chi- 
cago’s beautiful lake drive, known as ‘“ The 
Gold Coast,” of the great gymnasium, or the 
club-rooms or other institutions of his building. 

Instead you see the photographs of more 
than fifty young men and women who have 
gone out to different parts of the world as 
teachers or missionaries from the Fourth Pres- 
byterian Church. They are the products of 
the church. The very first glimpse around his 
room shows that he emphasises not his organi- 
sation, but what his organisation produces. 

Dr. Stone is a business man in religion, a 
practical man. He was born that way. There 
would be something the matter with any 
Church that could not find a place within its 
ranks for every sort of man or woman, as Pres- 
byterianism has found a place for Dr. Stone. 

“ One night of my life stands out as my de- 
ciding time,” he told me. “ That was the night 
that I spent in fighting out the question of 
whether I should go into business or into the 
ministry. Every professor at Amherst had told 
me to go into business.” 

And the professors had the very best of rea- 
sons. Here is John Timothy Stone’s story: 


BUSINESS IN RELIGION 45 


Behind him on his father’s side were five 
generations of Congregational ministers ; on his 
mother’s side he came of a clerical family. He 
was an only son and had two sisters, and when 
his father died, when he was eighteen, he tried 
to quit school to support them. But Dr. A. V. 
V. Raymond, later President of Union College, 
then pastor of the family’s church at Albany, 
New York, declared that John must go to 
school. He got four business men in Albany 
to underwrite John; they backed up his credit. 
The boy was a leader and Dr. Raymond and 
the business men knew it. 

A few years before John had astonished the 
pastor of the church, then Dr. Henry Darling, 
later President of Hamilton College, by re- 
questing that Dr. Darling accept him and five 
of his boy playmates as members in the church. 
Dr. Darling had asked him and his comrades 
to wait six months to prove the strength of 
their wishes in the matter, and at the end of 
that time, had found them all unchanged under 
John’s leadership. 

John Stone went to Amherst. His instinct 
for business and for organisation put him at 
the front immediately. He made as much 
money, perhaps, in the university as he would 
have made on the outside. 

“T was business manager of lots of things,” 


46 JOHN TIMOTHY STONE 


he told me. He went outside of his own col- 
lege and helped Cornell to arrange its first 
football schedule. He was elected business 
manager of the Amherst football team. He 
made money giving boxing lessons. He re- 
ceived pay as a football coach. He ran special 
trains to inter-collegiate football and baseball 
games. He wrote for newspapers and added to 
his income. 

At Auburn Theological Seminary, which he 
later attended, he established the first gymna- 
sium and got the young theological students all 
stirred up about sports, including football and 
baseball. 

“Why, I could make more money out of 
the business end of university sports,” he 
told me, “than I could hope to make out of 
preaching.” | 

And so the professors who knew John and 
his talents—who had seen him instinctively 
organise everything that came in his way— 
naturally told him to go into business. What 
they were really telling him, of course, was not 
to go out of business. 

When he was graduated he had the offer of a 
two-thousand-dollar-a-year job in the lumber 
business. He sat up all night about that job. 
The young man who did take it became a 
reputed millionaire. 





BUSINESS IN RELIGION A7 


“ But I had preached,” Dr. Stone told me, 
“and I couldn’t decide to go into business, or 
into anything else but the ministry.” 

And so into the ministry he took his talents 
of organisation and business and an energy that 
clicks twenty-four hours a day. At the age of 
twenty-six years he was the six-foot, upstand- 
ing, athletic, clear-headed pastor of the Olivet 
Presbyterian Church in Utica, New York. 
After two years he went to Cortland, New 
York, where he served a pastorate of four 
years. Utica and Cortland were in his home 
district in northern New York state. 

When he was thirty-two years old the outside 
world called him. In 1900 he was invited to 
the pulpit of the famous Brown Memorial 
Church in Baltimore. 

And after that, the national organisation of 
the Presbyterian Church began to utilise his 
talents. 

At first contact the business side of Dr. Stone 
is disconcerting. You are speaking with a man 
of handsome physical aspect, clear-eyed, firm- 
lipped, hard-headed and outspoken. Coming 
across him in the business world, in Wall 
Street, in New York, in the grain exchanges in 
Chicago or in the shipping business in Cali- 
fornia, you would know you had encountered a 
superior business man who was making a suc- 


48 JOHN TIMOTHY STONE 


cess of his life, who was master of his environ- 
ment and who took leadership when it was not 
readily granted him. 

But you will soon discover another man be- 
hind this impressive exterior. The question 
that every great business man asks is, “ What 
do people need?”’ Real business is the supply- 
ing of needs. In going into the ministry, Dr. 
John Timothy Stone, unwittingly, has never 
deserted the tenets of business. 

“Did you ever have any doubts in your re- 
ligion? ” I asked him toward the end of a long 
and enlightening interview. 

“Oh, yes,” he said, laughing. “ Plenty of 
them.”’ 

“When?” I asked him. 

“Oh, when I was in the university. When 
I was studying psychology. It seemed to me as 
if I had lost almost all my religion then.” 

“And how did you get over your doubts? ” 
I asked. | 

“Why, when I went out into the world again 
and saw what people needed and how the re- 
ligion of Christ filled these needs, all my doubts 
disappeared.” 

There was your business man, as we call him, 
noting the need of men and persuading himself 
how to fill it. 

“A sympathy with men in their problems 


BUSINESS IN RELIGION 49 


and needs ’—that is the minister’s lodestone, 
says Dr. Stone. 

The Church that he has in mind—and its 
organisation—will discover the needs of men 
and women and satisfy them as completely as 
possible. 

The history of the Fourth Presbyterian 
Church in Chicago, since John Timothy Stone’s 
pastorate began there in 1909, illustrates his 
faculty for probing for human needs. When 
he went to the church it had five hundred 
members; they represented the wealth and 
aristocracy of the city. During the first 
year he raised $850,000, a stupendous sum 
in those days—or in any day—for a church 
collection. 

Today that church on the “Gold Coast ” of 
Chicago has a membership of two thousand six 
hundred. Eighty per cent. of the members 
are men and women, boys and girls, who work 
for salaries or wages! Dr. Stone found those 
who needed the Church most and brought 
them in. 

At every church-service there are more men 
than women; no other church in the land, per- 
haps, has such a record for attracting men. Dr. 
Stone discovered that men needed the Church, 
and he went out and got them. 

The Fourth Presbyterian Church raises two 


50 JOHN TIMOTHY STONE 


hundred thousand dollars a year. It doesn’t 
need it all for itself. It takes one hundred 
thousand for its own purposes and the rest goes 
for benevolences elsewhere. It wasn’t merely 
a self-maintaining organisation that Dr. Stone 
built; it was an organisation that would do 
something; that would fill needs. 

As an automobile builder he would build cars 
that could tow other cars. 

Dr. Stone’s job in the national organisa- 
tion of his church has been to “ unorganise.”’ 
It’s a niche into which he fits exactly. The 
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church 
discovered, several years ago, that it had sixteen 
agencies of the Church doing work which could 
be done better by four agencies. 

A committee of fifteen was appointed by 
the General Assembly to reorganise and con- 
solidate the agencies of the Church and to 
cut their number down to four. And John 
Timothy Stone successfully acted as chairman 
of this committee. 

Of all the various kinds of ministers that 
must necessarily make up the clergy of a 
Protestant denomination in the United States, 
John Timothy Stone stands unique. 

He is an expert in needs—in the needs of 
his Church and in the needs of men and 
women. 


BUSINESS IN RELIGION 51 


“T’ve never heard him preach a sermon that 
didn’t aim at some particular thing,” a Chicago 
reporter who often “ covers’? Dr. Stone’s ser- 
mons told me. “ He’s no blind-hitter. He’s 
always showing folks how to reach something 
they need.” 

That, I submit, is getting down to bed-rock. 


Pa 
T. 





IV 


BISHOP CHARLES 
DAVID WILLIAMS 


A MAN WHO THOUGHT THE CHURCH 
WAS NOT A CYCLONE-CELLAR 


‘THE selfish viewpoint, as it is often demonstrated 

in religion, puzzles the man-on-the-street, the 
outsider. ‘“ Do not pass me by!” “Help me!”— 
these same prayers, delivered to the Throne of 
Grace, are prayed by folk-of-the-world to their 
fellow-men with the very same desire for personal 
aid that actuates the man on his knees. And the 
world is not unkind; it is surprising how often the 
folk-of-the-world have their prayers answered by 
their fellowmen. 

The powerful part which Bishop Charles David 
Williams * played was due, it would seem to an on- 
looker, to his opposition to selfishness in religion. 
He was an aggressive fighter against this selfishness. 

“Sometimes,” he told me, as we rode in a taxicab 
one afternoon through the streets of New York, 
“ when people come to me with their personal spirit- 
ual troubles, I feel like being rough with them. I 
feel like saying: “Forget your own soul. Quit wor- 
rying about yourself for a while. There are many 
people in worse trouble than you are. Get out into 
the world and help them. God will take care of 
your soul,’ ” 

Good firemen, good policemen, good soldiers— 
they have no right to consider their personal wel- 
fare when great tasks are to be done. Duty is 
uppermost then. It was Bishop Williams’ message 
to the Protestantism of America that a Christian’s 
job is to do something, regardless of consequences 
to himself. Bishop Williams had foes, here and 
there, among the very rich; I have heard him called 
a Radical because of his interest in social and 
industrial problems. I was not able to discover that 
he had ever ceased his activities, or regulated them, 
in order to escape that epithet. 


* Bishop Williams died two weeks after the date of this 
. interview. 


IV 


BISHOP CHARLES DAVID 
WILLIAMS 


HE difference between a clergyman of 
Ap power, who commands the attention of 

men, and the other kind, is that the great 
leader looks out from his church into the world 
while the other kind keeps his religion within 
the church and demands that the world come 
inside to get it. 

This fact I gradually uncovered in my talks 
with the leading clergymen of the country. 
Various clergymen draw their strength from 
the various parts they fill in American Prot- 
estantism, but Bishop Charles David Williams, 
of the Protestant Episcopal diocese of Mich- 
igan, is one of the leaders in the rapidly spread- 
ing belief that a religion locked up within 
church walls or within the mind and heart of a 
man or woman isn’t the kind that can be of 
much help to the world. 

Any one who sits in long and heart-to-heart 
conversation with Bishop Williams, as I have 
done—or who hears him preach from the pulpit 


55 


56 BISHOP CHARLES D. WILLIAMS 


—will get a brand new idea of what the church 
ought to be. 

If the sort of a Church which Bishop Wil- 
liams has in mind could be established among 
the institutions of the United States, this 
writer, for one, would no longer worry over 
hearing the frequent statement, “ The Church 
is fading out of American life.” 

A Church with its doors always opened, not 
so much that men and women might enter it, 
but that the power of Christianity might flow 
out of it—that’s the Church which I discover 
is the vision of Bishop Williams and other 
leaders in religious thought today. 

The Church is a power-house, not a safety- 
vault. ‘That’s what Bishop Williams tells you. 
He did not use these words to me, in our con- 
versation ; but in his thinking and his planning 
for the Church of the future you catch that 
idea as being the chief motive of all his service 
within the Church. . 

The church that keeps religion stowed away 
at the foot of its altar for use as need arises, is 
limiting its influence. It is doing part of its 
job, but not all. . 

This new idea of what Protestant churches 
might be as compared with what they are—an 
idea which Bishop Williams drives home every 
time he faces either associates or congregations 


THE POWER-HOUSE CHURCH 57 


—is so new and important and hope-compelling 
that I’ve worked it out in my mind into terms 
of the street, that I could fully grasp. 

A power-house may be only a charging sta- 
tion. After the miracle of producing power 
and storing it within the station had been per- 
formed motor cars may come there to have 
their batteries charged and then go out into 
the streets again to make use of that power. 
Or, a power-house may be a great station 
from which feed-wires run out and distribute 
power to all parts of a great city so that who- 
ever has need of power has only to raise a 
trolley pole to the wire or make other con- 
nections to receive the benefit of what the great 
station is sending out. 

These are both power stations, but Bishop 
Williams believes the Church ought to be of the 
latter kind. And, while he believes this, you 
discover he also dreams of even a more efficient 
station, one that, without wires, throws its 
power into the very ether so that its influence 
surrounds men, everywhere, and is right at 
their hands, ready for constant use. 

I am speaking for the man on the street in 
these chapters and I say truly that the sooner 
the churches in America become the sort of 
church that I find Bishop Williams has in mind, 
the sooner all questions will disappear as to 


58 BISHOP CHARLES D. WILLIAMS 


whether or not the Church is fulfilling its mis- 
sion in American life. Give us a Church that 
we can feel, out in the streets, a Church that 
sends out a power that comes to us in our daily 
lives, and no one needs to worry about how 
Americans will welcome a Church like that. 

Whatever Bishop Williams’ position may be 
within the Church itselfi—and it is one of 
power and influence—he is one of the great 
clergymen of America who serves as a contact 
between the Church and the man outside of the 
Church, the man in the factory or mine, the 
man in the office, the man on the street. 

“How many men do you know today,” he 
asked me, “who are asking what life is all 
about? ‘Why? Why? Why?’ is a question 
I hear everywhere. The man who is successful 
in the world, who has gained everything he 
thought he wanted, is more likely to ask it than 
the man who is still struggling. The man who 
has not yet reached success is often too busy to 
stop to ask why he’s toiling and what it’s all 
about. But when he has arrived at what he 
thought was his goal his mind and soul will be 
filled with doubts. He will look himself over, 
take account of himself, and, if he is a thought- 
ful man, will begin to ask, ‘ What is this all 
about? What have I been fighting for?’ 

“ Do you know why men in America reach a 


THE POWER-HOUSE CHURCH 59 


critical stage in their lives at about forty? It 
is because at about that age they begin to ask, 
“Why? What is life about?’ That’s a ques- 
tion that comes to a man who hasn’t developed 
a faith in spiritual things. Success in life only 
makes the question more acute. 

“Men must believe in something; they must. 
have purposes in life that do not suddenly come 
to an end, and leave them stranded and ques- 
tioning. Men everywhere are saying to us, 
‘ Sirs, we would see Jesus.’ The man who has 
a faith in spiritual things never loses his power 
at forty or at any other age. He never asks 
what life is about, what his efforts are for or 
whether they are worth while. That deadly 
question, ‘ Why?’ does not raise itself in his 
mind. The spiritual side of him has been 
developed and he lives a life that has its pur- 
pose founded not only on things of this 
world but of another and spiritual world. 
When worldly purposes fail him even stronger 
spiritual purposes work in his life, and he 
knows, without a doubt, the why of life, what 
it is all about. 

“Men do have souls, all men. That is the 
basis of religion. And men must have faith. 
They zant to have faith, if they can.” 

A great American humourist, chatting with 
friends, was describing a friend who, as he 


60 BISHOP CHARLES D. WILLIAMS 


thought, was spending a lot of time on a useless 
scheme. : 

“What he’s doing,” said the humourist, “ is 
about as useless as scolding a congregation on 
Sunday morning for not coming to church. 
The parson who does that is scolding the folks 
who don’t need it because there they are, in 
church, right in front of him.” 

As Bishop Williams talked I was reminded 
of this story. 

The kind of religion that Bishop Williams 
has in mind is a religion that men need out in 
the world. And out there, in the world, he 
finds them asking for it, hoping for it, wishing 
they had it. Is it any wonder, thinking as he 
does, that his attention is turned outside the 
church to the unchurched men and women of 
the United States? 

And please, my reader, do not believe that 
there is not fire in the eye of this man who 
carries his religion out into the world. You dis- 
cover very shortly, in contact with Bishop Wil- 
liams, that he is a fighter. He isn’t any mild, 
gentle bishop wandering ‘dreamingly about the 
world holding out vague hopes to mankind in 
mild and uncertain tones. If Christianity were 
not a compelling power you know, instinctively, 
that he would have nothing to do with it. 

Right outside his church door, as he steps 


THE POWER-HOUSE CHURCH 61 


away from the portals, he knows that he will 
find something to hit at. And this thing is a 
very definite thing in his mind. As he talks 
you hear him name this thing over and over 
again. It is ‘‘ Paganism.” To turn men from 
paganism to the philosophy and religion of 
Jesus Christ is this bishop’s definite aim in life. 
Paganism angers him; he is always seeking for 
it and its works. 

As he told me about the paganism he finds: in 
most of our human institutions, I thought of 
that kind man who is described in the Bible as 
having found, by the roadside, a_ battered 
stranger who had fallen among thieves. In my 
mind, as he talked, I put Bishop Williams in 
the place of the good Samaritan. What would 
he have done? 

He would have helped the fallen man, beyond 
a doubt; picked him up and given him all the 
aid he could. And all the time, as he gave the 
bruised man aid, he would be saying to himself, 
“Just as soon as I get this fellow on his feet 
again, I’m going out and hunt up that gang of 
thieves and have something done about this. 
This has got to stop.” 

You discover, as you speak with Bishop Wil- 
liams, why, in some circles, he is called a 
Socialist. 

He has always hit at what he believes to be 


62 BISHOP CHARLES D. WILLIAMS 


injustice in the business world. As I talked 
with him about his life dream of having Chris- 
tianity settle the problems of society, I used the 
patois of Socialism, the terms, even of Bolshe- 
vism—“ social injustice,’ “the rights of the 
masses,”’ the evils of “ profits” and other terms 
with which most newspaper readers are famil- 
iar in these days. He knows these terms by 
heart, but he has one name for all the known 
evils of economic life.’ It is not a name that 
you find in the dictionary of Socialism; it is a 
name at which a Socialist might laugh. But he 
finds his word in the history of Christianity. 
It is “ paganism.” 

“We have paganism in our international af- 
fairs,” he told me. “ We find the world appar- 
ently topsy-turvy today, after almost twenty 
centuries of an attempt to follow Christ and 
His teachings. We have the greatest war in 
human history fought between nations that 
have followed Christianity. We have the out- 
side world looking on the Christian nations in 
wonder and surprise. What is the matter with 
us? It is because we haven’t been thorough- 
going Christian nations. The old paganism 
which ruled by force instead of by love and 
which ignored the Golden Rule for the rule of 
might hasn’t been wiped out during these 
twenty centuries. 


THE POWER-HOUSE CHURCH 63 


“We find paganism in our social and eco- 
nomic affairs. Whenever you find a social or 
an economic injustice being perpetuated you 
find not Christianity but paganism at work. 
Christ intended that His teachings should drive 
paganism out of the world and put great aims 
and spiritual hopes into the hearts and minds 
of men. And men, I find, want these aims and 
hopes. We are tired of paganism. It leads to 
nothing but the destruction of men and the 
destruction of nations. 

“The Church, if it is to survive as an insti- 
tution among men, must go out into the world 
and carry Christianity and its power every- 
where that men are found. 

“Whatever weakness you find in the Church 
today exists because of the failure of the 
Church to do this.” 

And what about the personal side of this 
famous man of the Church? 

“IT was a farmer boy,” he told me. “ My 
mother was a Methodist and I had my mind 
turned to religion when I was a child. I grew 
up, [ think, with the idea in my mind that I was 
to become a clergyman. It seemed to me, from 
the very first, that it was the natural thing for 
me to be a Christian.” 

“Were you ever converted?” I asked. 

“T can’t remember ever having had any 


64 BISHOP CHARLES D. WILLIAMS 


mystical experience in my religious life,’ he 
said. 

“ But didn’t you ever have any doubts as to 
religion?” I asked. 

“Oh, many, many times,” he answered, with 
a laugh. : 

“At the university?” I suggested. For 
every clergyman with whom I have talked 
has admitted to me that, in the university or 
college, he felt his religion slipping away 
from him. : 

“Yes! Yes!” answered the Bishop, laugh- 
ing. “Intellectual measles is what I call such 
attacks of doubts. Almost every young man in 
school gets them.” 

“ But why do they get intellectual measles in 
the universities? ” I persisted. 

“It is very simple,” he answered, seriously. 
“ Up to the time a young man goes to college, 
his religion has been a matter of the emotions. 
His faith has been founded on his emotion. 
But, in the higher schools, he discovers that his 
mind is seeking to justify the faith which his 
emotions have previously sustained. My mind 
achieved this and I discovered that it supported 
my faith in Christianity as well as my emotions 
had done. That transfer of faith from the 
emotions to the mind comes to the average 
young man in school and the best name I have 


THE POWER-HOUSE CHURCH 65 


ever found for the experience is the ‘ intel- 
lectual measles.’ ”’ 

Bishop Williams’s career began in Ohio. He 
was born at Bellevue in 1860 and attended 
Kenyon College. He became a deacon at the 
age of twenty-three and, a year later, a minister 
in the Protestant Episcopal church. He served 
as rector in small charges in Ohio until, at the 
age of thirty-three, he became dean of Trinity 
Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio. He served in the 
cathedral until he was elected and consecrated 
Bishop of Michigan, in 1906. 

In Cleveland he was constantly engaged in 
activities outside the church, but always in his 
capacity as a representative of Christianity. 
He served as president of the library board of 
Cleveland for two terms and was chaplain of 
the Ohio National Guard for a time. Labour 
leaders knew him and came to him for advice; 
so did many of the great employers of Cleve- 
land. His name was a household word in 
the city. 

Just as Bishop Williams does not believe in a 
Christianity that is walled within a church, 
neither does he believe in a personal locked-up 
Christianity. 

You know, well enough, after talking with 
him, what this short, gray-haired, smiling man 
would say to you if you went to him with a 


66 BISHOP CHARLES D. WILLIAMS 


personal spiritual problem. It is possible that, 
in print, the advice which he might give you 
will appear cold, but in your ears they would 
ring with life and hope. 

“ Quit worrying about your soul.” 

If there is anything that this rugged, square- 
shaped bishop believes and teaches with more 
earnestness than another it is the doctrine that 
if you try to save your life you shall lose it and 
if you are willing to lose it for Christ’s sake, 
you shall save it. 

“There is no other way by which a man can 
be saved,” he told me. “ Salvation comes by 
unselfishness. Selfishness, the direct effort to 
save your life, is paganism. 

“Spend your life, your soul, your self 
—that is the very fundamental of Christian 
experience.” 

Yes, you know very well after uncovering 
this man, that, if you went to him with your 
own spiritual problem, he would, in every like- 
lihood, tell you to stop worrying about it—and 
send you out to do something for somebody. 

An artist could paint the position which 
Charles David Williams holds in the Protes- 
tantism of the United States far better than 
any writer can describe it. 

The picture would show a great, massive 
church on a bleak, wintry night. The windows 


THE POWER-HOUSE CHURCH 67 


would be bursting with light and through the 
open doors, into which crowds would be pass- 
ing, you could catch glimpses of the brightness 
and warmth and comfort within. 

But, moving away from the church, out into 
the darkness, with his back turned to all the 
comfort and spiritual assurance within the 
church walls, would be the figure of a man, 
holding a raised and gleaming cross. 

That pictured man would be Bishop Wil- 
liams. And he would be expecting you, as a 
Christian, to follow him. 





V 
JOHN ROACH STRATON 


AN “OLD-TIME RELIGIONIST ” 


W HT has the “old-time religion” to say for 
itself? 

To tell the truth, it speaks strongly. The message 
it sends out to the world through such a virile and 
lively clergyman as John Roach Straton is convinc- 
ing. Within the space of one month this writer 
held long interviews with Harry Emerson Fosdick, 
the great liberal leader, and with John Roach 
Straton, who is an able spokesman for the funda- 
mentalist viewpoint. There is something convinc- 
ing in what both men say. But I discover that 
these two men appeal to two different sides of 
my being. One speaks to my brain; the other to my 
heart. One appeals to my thoughts; the other to my 
emotions. ‘ The old-time religion,” as it is erro- 
neously called—for it is being preached everywhere 
throughout the land—thrusts my thoughts aside and 
reaches me through my deepest emotions. 

I have no intention, as an outsider, of taking sides 
in the issue between the fundamentalist and the lib- 
eral schools of religious thought, though, frankly, 
I must say that I believe that a religion that ap- 
peals to the emotions rather than to the intellect 
is likely to exert the more powerful influence on the 
life of the average person. 

The fact remains, however, and as a reporter I 
am bound to record it, that both schools of religious 
thought, one with a brain-appeal and the other with 
a heart-appeal, seem to have a strong foothold in 
our churches in America. 


¥ 
JOHN ROACH STRATON 


“ And when, in scenes of glory, 
I sing the new, new song, 
‘Twill be the old, old story, 

That I have loved so long.” 


VERY word of this old song, forgotten 
for years, came back to me from my 
boyhood as I talked with John Roach 

Straton. 

How astonishing it was that he, John Roach 
Straton, should send my mind back to so simple 
a thing as old-time religion! Frankly, I hadn’t 
known what I would come away with from 
talking with this man. And I left him with this 
sweet old song ringing in my mind. 

The New York daily papers, for over a year, 
had been telling of John Roach Straton and 
his work. He visited the dance halls of New 
York; criminals went to jail and police officers 
lost their jobs because of what Straton told in 
an Easter evening sermon. While all New 
York was joking uneasily about the fact that 
almost every play it went to see was rotten and 


71 


72 JOHN ROACH STRATON 


while New York was wondering why it couldn’t 
see a good play now and then Straton arose and 
told New York that men who controlled the 
stage had decided that rottenness paid better 
than cleanliness and that rottenness, therefore, 
was what New York would get, if it went to the 
theatres. It had been burned into my mind, 
therefore, that Straton was a fighter of dance 
halls and lewd plays, a sensationalist. 

When I talked with him I wanted to know 
why he was a fighter of these things; why these 
particularly sensational subjects had attracted 
his attention. 

And ali he talked to me about was the “ old, 
old story, of Jesus and His love.”” After I had 
heard him through, I could see the why of all 
he says and does. 

In the first place, I had expected, from all I 
had read and heard, to meet a hard-eyed, gray- 
haired, fun-hating, emotionless, bitter old Puri- 
tan, with a touch of side whiskers and never a 
smile. I didn’t know whether I wanted to write 
about him or not. I found him young, good to 
look at, prematurely gray, with blue eyes, in- 
credibly happy and kind and never a shadow of 
side-burns. 

Two minutes—and I knew the world he lived 
in was not the world of white-lighted 
Broadway, or narrow-paved Wall Street, of 


AN “OLD-TIME RELIGIONIST” 73 


sensationalism and newspaper columns. His 
Master’s work has taken him to those places. 

I ask: “‘ Wouldn’t a churchful of old-time 
Christians be a sensation in your town?” 

He got my mind off the theatres and the 
dance -halls and off the newspaper-made 
Straton, who was in my thoughts, way back 
to Galilee, whence, I found, he himself takes 
his inspiration. 

“ The trouble with Christianity,” he told me, 
“is that it has never been put over on the world. 
We must start way at the beginning, with the 
simple story of Christ, and begin all over again. 
We must get the world to take a new try at 
being Christian. 

“The story of Christianity changed the 
world, once. And if Christianity had not been 
side-tracked, the world would have stayed 
changed and would never have reverted to the 
paganism in which we find ourselves today. 

‘The simple story of Christ can change the 
world again and we must forget everything 
else and tell only that story—Christ and Him 
crucified. 

“We must prove to the world again, as 
Christ and His disciples proved to it, that there 
is nothing natural about Christianity, but that it 
is all supernatural ; that it is a plan of God, not 
a scheme of men. 


74 JOHN ROACH STRATON 


“We must show that Christ and His follow- 
ers taught men to know God not with their 
minds but with their hearts, and that it is only 
through their hearts that they shall know Him. 

“ Today we are trying to reach Him through 
the scientists and the analysts, the historians 
and the anthropologists, and we are stretching 
our brains in our churches trying to appre- 
hend Him. 

“ We must teach the world again how to seek 
Him with its whole heart. Christianity and the 
Church were thrown off the track about three 
centuries after Christ left the world; the devil 
crawled into the Church then and curled himself 
up there and he has been there ever since. 

“ Christianity is far simpler than the thing 
we call religion today. It was its very sim- 
plicity that rocked the world. 

“ Did you ever stop to think how simple it 
really was, as Christ preached it, and as His 
disciples taught it? There was no Darwinism 
in it and no problems of brain or science. It 
was all love and sacrifice. 

“And did you ever, stop to think what a 
mighty power it was? You know, all Christ 
told His disciples to do was to go out into the 
world and tell about Him and the story of His 
crucifixion and resurrection. ‘That was all. It 
was a perfectly simple story; a beautiful story. 


AN “OLD-TIME RELIGIONIST” 75 


“ After He had gone, the world was divided 
into two parts. On the one side was the great 
Roman empire, mistress of the earth, with its 
riches, unlimited power, and sin. On the other 
side was the tiny band of disciples. They were 
illiterate men, from the working classes. They 
were broke. Peter said to a beggar: ‘ Silver 
and gold have I none.’ Christ had told them 
just to tell the story of what they knew. And 
as soon as they began to tell it the world began 
to rock. E;verywhere men believed them. And 
men who believed worked miracles. Before 
long the simple story had found its way to 
Rome. And the story remained simple, without 
any frills. Persecuting the Christians and kill- 
ing them did not weaken the power of the story. 
Men who heard that story could not help but - 
believe. 

“Christ knew what power that story would 
have over men. He said, ‘ And J, if I be lifted 
up, will draw all men unto me.’ Who could be 
surer of the power of God than He? 

“The disciples died and disappeared from 
among men, but the story remained and men 
told it to each other everywhere. A_ hun- 
dred years after the crucifixion, it is esti- 
mated there were two hundred thousand 
Christians in the world. Three hundred 
years later there were about eight million Chris- 


76 JOHN ROACH STRATON 


tians in the world, one-fifteenth of the Roman 
population. 

“For three hundred years that simple story 
had compelled men to believe. And the lives of 
Christians made them envied of men. Let me 
show you what men thought of Christians in 
those days when the story of Christ was simple. 
Cyprian of Syracuse wrote a letter to a friend. 
Pll read it to you.” 

In a soft Southern accent, the preacher read 
these words, written when Christianity was 
three hundred years old: 

““This is a cheerful world as I see it from 
my garden, under the shadow of my vines. But 
if I could ascend some high mountain, and look 
out over the wide lands, you know very well 
what I should see; brigands on the highways, 
pirates on the seas, armies fighting, cities burn- 
ing; in the amphitheaters, men murdered to 
please applauding crowds; selfishness and cru- 
elty and misery and despair under all roofs. It 
is a bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad 
world. But I have discovered in the midst of 
it a quiet and holy people who have learned a 
great secret. They have found a joy which is 
a thousand times better than any of the pleas- 
ures of our sinful life. They are despised and 
persecuted, but they care not. They are mas- 
ters of their souls. They have overcome the 


AN “OLD-TIME RELIGIONIST” 77 


world. These people, Donatus, are the Chris- 
tians—and I am one of them.’ ”’ 

“That was a powerful story that worked, not 
intellectual changes in the minds of men, but 
miracle changes in their hearts and in the very 
seats of their lives,’ Dr. Straton went on. “ It 
made men new men, different from other men 
in the world, interested in things of the spirit, 
not in the things of the world around them. 

“It was a story that made men believe in 
eternity, and that taught them the value of sac- 
rifice in exchange for life in that eternity. It 
taught them the futility of the things of this 
world and the importance of the things of eter- 
nity. It made theme serene and master of 
their souls. 

“‘ And then, suddenly, it was sidetracked. A 
Roman emperor took it into his head not only 
to stop persecuting the Christians but to recog- 
nise them and take them into the Roman fold. 
The leaders of Christianity were overwhelmed 
by the recognition. Pagan Rome took the 
Church into itself and the Church, in its turn, 
took in Rome. Two drops of quicksilver 
merged.” 

The preacher banged his desk. “ And right 
then and there, the story ceased being simple. 
Paganism entered the Church and has been in 
the Church ever since. Its trappings are in our 


78 JOHN ROACH STRATON 


churches yet.” (I told you he was old- 
fashioned.) “ They’re on our altar rails, and 
on our preachers and on our choirs.” (I have 
been told that Dr. Straton, in his pulpit in Cal- 
vary Baptist church, has refused to wear the 
black robe, which is customary in churches of 
all denominations in the East. ) 

“ All I’m trying to do is to get way, way back 
to Jesus and the simple story He sent His apos- 
tles out to tell, You may call it old-fashioned, 
if you want to, because it’s over nineteen hun- 
dred years old. But I want my religion nine- 
teen hundred years old. That religion, nineteen 
hundred years ago, proved itself a religion of 
power. And it went on, proving that, for three 
centuries, 

* After that it was muffled and distorted and 
twisted and buried in words and phrases and 
scholasticism, until, today, the wonder is that 
it has been powerful enough to endure so that 
we can even catch glimpses of its force and 
beauty. 

“ But, thank God, they’ve left the Bible alone. 
The simple story that Christ told His apostles 
to go out and preach is right here in this 
book, in beautiful and simple words,” said the 
preacher, lifting a Bible from his desk. “ It’s 
all right there and if anyone asks me how we 
can get back to the story of Christ, as He 


AN “OLD-TIME RELIGIONIST” 79 


wanted it told to men, I only hold out this book 
and say, ‘ Forget everything else that man has 
achieved, with his hands or his brain, since this 
story was first told. Lay that all aside and go 
back to this old story and tell it to men. And 
soon, throughout the world, they will be whis- 
pering it, in wonder and in love, to each other 
as they did once before. They will understand 
it with their hearts. And the world will be 
filled with miracles.’ ”’ 

You may be sure enough that Dr. Straton 
holds no beliefs in common with some of 
the famous clergymen of America who be- 
lieve in intellectual comprehension of Christ’s 
philosophy. 

The brain and the mind are out of it, with 
Dr. Straton. “ With your hearts ye shall know 
Him,” he repeats over and over. 

“Do you know what I tell these fellows 
who believe in intellectual comprehension of 
Christianity? ’’ he said, earnestly. “Just 
put this down. It’s the simplest thing in the 
world: 

“Men don’t go into sin with their brains. 
Any good set of brains will tell the owner to 
keep out of sin. Emotions and passions, not 
brains, lead men into sin, even while brains may 
be telling them to stay out. 

““Men must leave sin by the same door 


80 JOHN ROACH STRATON 


through which they entered it, through the door 
of the emotions. It is by the emotions that men 
grasp and comprehend that simple story of 
Christ.” 

Conspicuous and powerful as he is, Straton’s 
whole thought and life is hinged on an experi- 
ence which came to him when he was a wild 
youth of eighteen in Atlanta, Georgia. His 
father and mother were Christians but his 
studies and reading had unseated all his re- 
ligious belief. 

“I lost not only my faith but my morals as 
well,” he told me. “I threw everything aside.” 
One evening, with some young men, he went, in 
a light mood, to a revival meeting in the old 
First Baptist church, of Atlanta. He heard an 
old-fashioned sermon and that night he was 
converted. 

“ A miracle was worked in my life,” he says. 
“ And when we begin to tell only the old, old 
story from the pulpits of America, we can fill 
our land with miracles of that kind.” 

The eloquence of Dr. Straton is surpassingly 
beautiful in its simplicity; his church is filled 
to overflowing at every sermon and thousands 
of persons, in their homes, hear his sermons 
through the wireless broadcasting set that is 
fixed to the rim of his pulpit. It is possible for 
members of his’ old congregations in Norfolk 


AN “OLD-TIME RELIGIONIST” 81 


and Baltimore, and even, at times, in Chicago, 
to hear him preach. One Sunday recently, he 
sent out into the ether, in ringing tones, a story 
which electrified his own audience and which | 
give as a sample of the simplicity of his belief 
and the charm of his eloquence: 

“Yonder, in the beautiful city of Baltimore, 
at the entrance of the great Johns Hopkins 
Hospital, there stands an exquisite, white, mar- 
ble statue of Christ. It is in the great hall-way 
just inside the entrance door. It is a majestic 
and commanding and yet most compassionate 
figure. The arms are outstretched, the nail 
wounds are seen in the hands, the genius of the 
sculptor has put upon the face an expression of 
benignant longing, of yearning compassion. 
Inscribed upon the base of the statue are those 
words that fell from His own lips, ‘ Come unto 
Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and 
I will give you rest.’ It is an appropriate and 
beautiful monument for the entrance of a hos- 
pital, and many a troubled spirit and pain- 
racked body has been blessed in looking upon it. 

“ But it is said that once there came a cynic 
and a doubter, and he looked long and atten- 
tively upon that figure. He viewed it from the 
right and then he walked once more in front, 
but turned away at last with something like dis- 
appointment written upon his face. But there 


82 JOHN ROACH STRATON 


was standing also near a little girl. With child- 
ish curiosity and eagerness she watched his 
face, and then when she saw him turn away 
without having read the deep message of that 
beautiful figure, she ran up to him and said, 
‘Oh, sir, you cannot see Him that way. You 
must get very close and fall upon your knees 
and look up!’ ” 

As a man on the street, looking at the church 
from outside, and trying to size it up through 
its clergymen, I find a thrill in the religion of 
John Roach Straton. It is a religion for men 
and women in trouble, in a troubled world. 


VI 
S. PARKES CADMAN 


THE PREACHER WHO “KNOWS” 


HE man who knows is the man who catches the 

world’s attention; he is the man who leads. The 
world asks him to do its great tasks. If this applies 
in the world of business or science or engineering 
or law or medicine why should it not also apply in 
the realm of religion? 

The world yields authority to the man who 
knows; it will yield authority to the clergyman who 
knows. The man on the street, unchurched, or the 
woman in the home, unchurched, today do not often 
hear or appeal to clergymen who speak with un- 
certain authority of Divine affairs. In this book, 
elsewhere, the occasional mediocrity of the pulpit 
is mentioned. 

Wishy-washy, half-baked and hesitating opinions 
on any subject do not get a hearing from the Ameri- 
can public. We insist on experts, men who act on 
convictions and what they believe to be incontro- 
vertible knowledge. 

Dr. S. Parkes Cadman has, I believe, no hearers 
who do not swear by his beliefs and opinions. I 
have heard over the radio 3,000 men, Sunday after 
Sunday, cheer and shout and clap their hands in 
response to some opinion of Dr. Cadman on civic, 
political or economic questions. ‘Dr. Cadman is so 
sure of his ground and so assertive that only those 
who accept his opinions find themselves comfortable 
in his audiences. 


VI 


S. PARKES CADMAN 


when he isn’t busy at his job of being 
a minister of the Gospel. 

In all my studies of the prominent clergymen 
of the United States I’ve often found myself 
wondering, ‘“ What is a parson’s job, any- 
how?” When I finally got hold of 8. Parkes 
Cadman, I discovered that, if I had a talk with 
him, it would have to be while he was working 
at his job. And, as he worked, I saw something 
of the tasks that a busy clergyman makes a part 
of his profession. 

Dr. Cadman reminded me of a certain fa- 
mous French general I tried to interview during 
the war. I waited for several days until I got 
word that the general wasn’t too busy to talk. 
When I entered his office I found a battery of 
six telephones lined up on his desk. 

I had prepared a list of questions to fire at the 
great old warrior. A telephone bell rang as 
soon as I started on my first question. The 
general answered the ’phone, hung up the re- 


85 


Yo: can’t catch Samuel Parkes Cadman 


86 S. PARKES CADMAN 


ceiver and then turned to me again and said, 
‘Now try again. What did you ask me?” 

I repeated the question, but before I got an 
answer an orderly came into the room with a 
note. The general took a pen and paper and 
wrote a short reply, while the orderly waited. 

“ Now what did you say?” asked the general 
when the orderly had gone. 

I tried the question again. Two telephones 
rang. The general answered one and his secre- 
tary stepped in from another room to answer 
the other. 

“Please have patience,’ said the general, 
when the ’phones were silent again. He began 
to answer my question when his orderly inter- 
rupted with another message. 

Half an hour had passed; I gave up and told 
the general I would come some other day. I 
never did have an interview with that man; but 
I had a story about him that told, more clearly 
than anything he could have said to me, what 
kind of a man he was. 

That general believed in the war—and he 
didn’t have to tell me so, in so many words. 

Dr. Cadman reminded me, also, of a Wall 
Street oil magnate who once tried to tell me 
about his business and his career. 

secretaries kept running in and out, as we 
tried to talk; one brought him a telegram 


THE PREACHER WHO “KNOWS” 87 


showing that a new well in Mexico was throw- 
ing out hundreds of barrels of oil an hour; 
he gave orders over the telephone to half a 
dozen different branches of his great busi- 
ness; brokers called him on the telephone for 
information. 

Finally he said to me, in apology, “I don’t 
see how you can make head or tail out of what 
I’m telling you.” 

I had to explain that what he was doing was 
just as important and enlightening to me as 
what he was saying. } 

It was easy enough to see that he believed in 
the oil business. He didn’t have to tell me that 
he did. 

I caught that French general up to his neck in 
the business of fighting the war; caught that oil 
man up to his neck in the job of running his 
business. It was the only way I could have 
caught either of them because, for twenty-four 
hours a day, the general was a general, busy at 
war, and the oil man was an oil man, sunk in 
business. 

So I caught Dr. Cadman—and it is the only 
way any one can catch him. He is busy all the 
time, with the astonishing busyness of a strong 
man who has good health and virility to throw 
away. 

The first temptation is to analyse his busy- 


88 S. PARKES CADMAN 


ness; but I discovered that to do that would 
sidetrack me. It wasn’t so much Cadman him- 
self as the thing Cadman believed in that I was 
after. It was a beautiful spring morning in 
Brooklyn, with trees budding at the window, 
but we couldn’t sit in his office and talk quietly. 
He had just come from the bedside of a dying 
man. ‘There were three other homes to visit 
immediately. An automobile was waiting out- 
side. It was the kind of an automobile the 
French general or the American oil man might 
have had. It wasn’t a fancy automobile; it 
showed marks of service; a chauffeur sat at 
the wheel. 

That entire afternoon was scheduled. I 
talked to the chauffeur almost as much as I did 
to Dr. Cadman during that interview. 

“Every day’s like this,” said the colored 
chauffeur; “I have to take him to all these 
places this morning and then get him to the 
depot to catch the noon train. He’s going 
somewhere to a funeral.” | 

The driver had a list of addresses, prepared 
the day before by Dr. Cadman’s secretary. 

A physician drove up at high speed, and we 
stopped before a big stone house. An automo- 
bile truck drove away after having delivered 
half a dozen oxygen tanks. There was a fight 
for life going on in that mansion. Science was 


THE PREACHER WHO “KNOWS” 89 


trying to keep a man from slipping into eternity. 

Dr. Cadman reached into his overcoat pocket 
and I saw his hand cover a little leather-bound 
Bible. A fine smile it was that I saw on his 
face as he stepped out of the car. There was 
confidence in that smile and assurance; there 
was more than belief in it; there was knowl- 
edge. ‘That was the smile that he was carrying 
into the presence of death. 

I saw the physician stop and look at the tanks 
of oxygen; I presume he had ordered them, as 
aids of science, for his patient. I saw him 
plunge up the steps, carrying his medicine case. 
And then I saw the short, square, strong figure 
of the clergyman, as he walked up the steps and 
disappeared through the doorway. I don’t 
know what help the physician was taking into 
that house; I don’t know how firmly he believed 
in the power of the science which he had called 
to his aid. But I do know the smiling light that 
was on the square and rugged face of that min- 
ister as he stepped beside that bedside; and I 
know that he knew the power of the religion he 
represented. 

He came out soon. He climbed into the car 
and as we started off he took up his talk where 
we had left it. 

“No theories! No theories!’’ he said. “I 
don’t believe in theories. They’re dangerous, 


90 S. PARKES CADMAN 


in everything—in business, in religion, in gov- 
ernment. We must have things in this world 
that work. If things don’t work, don’t waste 
time on them. We must be practical. Time is 
too valuable to fool with theories.” 

I thought of how he had taken something 
that he knew would work into that sick-room. 
He hadn’t carried any theory to that bedside. 
Until we came to another house of sickness he 
spent the time telling me about his conversion. 

“You can’t wear such a wonderful experi- 
ence as that on your sleeve, for every one to 
see,” he said. “It was an overwhelming ex- 
perience. I was sixteen years old. My father 
was a Methodist preacher and I was raised in 
religious surroundings and I wanted to be con- 
verted; I had expected to be converted. When 
the experience came I found a new direction 
for my whole life. I have been headed in that 
direction ever since.” 

A policeman at a street crossing touched his 
cap and smiled at Dr. Cadman; the preacher ~ 
touched his hat and smiled back. After we had 
received salutes from four policemen, I asked 
Dr. Cadman how long he had been in Brooklyn? 

“Twenty-two years at the Central Congre- 
gational Church,” he said. We were stopping 
before another house of sickness. 

As he backed out of the automobile he said, 


THE PREACHER WHO “KNOWS” 91 


“T’ve taken four thousand members into that 
church in twenty-two years.”’ 

While he was in this house I figured out with 
pencil and paper that an average of four per- 
sons had joined Dr. Cadman’s church every 
Sunday during almost a quarter of a century. 

At this rate, I calculated, the churches in the 
United States would grow at the rate of over 
four million members a year, instead of con- 
siderably less than a million, as an average. I 
was just figuring how astonishingly Dr. Cad- 
man was holding up his end of the church 
plank in America when he came into the car 
again. 

“ Four thousand new members in twenty-two 
years,’ he repeated, taking up his talk where he 
had left off. 

“That’s four a week,” I suggested. 

“Not any too good,” he said. “Lots of 
lodges grow more quickly than that, don’t they ? 
But it’s pretty good for a church in these days.” 

“ How did you happen to go into the Congre- 
gational Church from the Methodist Church? ” 
I asked. : 

Right there I uncovered what one preacher, 
at least, thinks of the divisions of Protestantism 
in the United States. | 

“ Because I was called there,’ he answered 
crisply. Before we reached the next house 


92 S. PARKES CADMAN 


which death was menacing Dr. Cadman told 
me about how the divisions in Protestantism 
were holding up the teaching of religion in the 
public schools of America. 

“ We ought to be teaching the children about 
God in the public schools of the country,” he 
told me. “ But only too often the Protestants 
stand in the way while the Jews and Catholics 
often seem willing to have such a system insti- 
tuted. We had a preacher come over to Brook- 
lyn once to tell the ministers’ association about 
the benefits of teaching religion in the public 
schools. He talked splendidly. We were all 
enthusiastic. But he wound up his talk by 
telling us that he wanted his own particular 
creed taught in the schools; he wouldn’t coun- 
tenance anything else.” 

“How many different churches are there in 
Brooklyn?” I asked, remembering that Brook- 
lyn is called the “ City of Churches.” 

“ I don’t know, but I do know that there are 
altogether too many,” he answered. “ There 
are eighty-three divisions of Protestants,” he 
added. | 

He went into another house while I waited. 

When he came out he plunged into conversa- 
tion again; perhaps something that had hap- 
pened at the bedside gave him his theme. 

“ People in this world need religion,” he said. 


THE PREACHER WHO “KNOWS” 93 


“They need it like they need sleep, or food, or 
water. Religion is a necessity of life. You 
can't live life rightly without it. I don’t worry 
about religion dying out in this generation or in 
any generation. Wipe religion right out of our 
civilisation today and you'll have it with you 
again tomorrow. And by religion I don’t mean 
religious theories. I mean a belief in a super- 
natural God; a belief in immortality; a belief 
that helps people to build their lives. People 
will have religion, because they must have it. 
The demand for it is born in them.” 

We were at the railroad station at last; the 
chauffeur called our attention to the fact. The 
train left in five minutes. 

Dr. Cadman stood on the curb and talked 
four minutes more. | 

I tried to get him to talk about the Church; 
about the Bible. I hope my readers will under- 
stand me when I say that I might as well have 
tried to get that French general to talk about 
one certain gun or the oil man to talk about one 
certain oil derrick, forgetting the great things 
that the gun or the derrick might be doing. It 
is the things that are being done and that ought 
to be done—not the tools for doing them—that 
interest your great man. Give him the tools 
and he forgets them; his mind dwells on the 
things that his tools accomplish, 


94 S. PARKES CADMAN 


One of the last things he said to me in that 
firing-line talk that morning was this (and I 
hope my readers will find in his words the 
meaning that I got out of them): 

“ People too often forget that the Bible is 
only a prescription. Only too often, instead 
of following the prescription, they try to 
swallow it, mistaking it for the medicine it 
specifies.”’ 

That was a simple picture, true to the oc- 
casion, after that morning of death-beds. I 
could see in it all the causes for the divisions 
in the Protestant Church. against which Dr. 
Cadman fights. 

There was the great Doctor of Nazareth giv- 
ing the prescription to men; and here were men 
in the pulpits of America, devouring the words 
of the prescription itself and ignoring the 
Restorative. 

As the rugged face turned away from me, 
with a smile—yes, and a hearty wink—and the 
sturdy, square back disappeared in the crowd, I 
was left with that picture in my mind, of the 
strange and inexplicable quarrel among men 
over the Prescription. 

When a man works as hard as Dr. Cadman 
works, he must not only believe in the thing he 
works for, but he must know that it is worth his 
while. Dr. Cadman is, I understand, one of the 


THE PREACHER WHO “KNOWS” 95 


best known pulpit orators and lecturers in the 
United States. He rarely misses a Sunday in 
his own pulpit, but he travels extensively to 
keep important lecture engagements. He has 
been known to travel half way across the conti- 
nent to deliver a single lecture. 

He is a strong man, and the world call on 
strong men, to give it what it needs. It 
wasn't hard for me, as a man on the street, 
to see Samuel Parkes Cadman behind the desk 
of that able old French general or in the chair 
of that successful oil man. You do not need 
to know of the books he has written or of 
the prominent positions he holds on various 
boards and directorates to realise the high abil- 
ity of the man. 

He knows what he knows, as strong men do. 
And he speaks with the authority of that knowl- 
edge. You can’t talk with him very long, or 
hear him preach or lecture—or see him at his 
work—without realising that there is such a 
thing in this world as religion; that this strong 
man knows that religion is a need of humanity; 
that he has decided for himself that it is worth 
a lifetime of effort to bring religion to man. 

You can leave to weak men the simple and 
futile task of taking religion at its face value, 
without test or without personal experience or 
knowledge of it. It was this writer’s growing 


96 S. PARKES CADMAN 


conviction, as he progressed with his studies of 
various men who hold places of importance in 
American pulpits, that one trouble with the 
Church is that it is too greatly manned by men 
who lack personal and mystic experience of 
religion and its power. 

The weak men of the Church are the mere 
prescription-readers; they are safe, it seems, in 
passing on divine advice. 

The strong men of the Church whom I have 
met, like Dr. Cadman, are the pharmacists who 
try to fill the Prescription. They are full of 
assurance and positive personal knowledge; 
brave enough to speak with authority. That’s 
the only kind of a preacher that I, as a man on 
the street, find it worth while listening to; the 
only kind that proves the power of religion 
to me. 

It wasn’t the mere Prescription that that 
sturdy, square-shouldered man carried to those 
sick-beds, as he entered those homes, with his 
hand on his pocket Bible, that spring morning. 
With all reverence I say it was the Medicine 
prepared with faith and knowledge, by a strong 
man, with no theories, who knew it would work. 

I have found several clergymen, in my 
search, who are making the kind of Church the 
world needs; Dr. Cadman is one of them. Find 
in America a hundred of him, and put them to 


THE PREACHER WHO “KNOWS” 97 


work, and it won’t take many years to prove to 
us all that there is a way by which the Church 
and religion can make our bewildered lives, 
with all the distractions of our civilisation, pur- 
poseful and aimed; fully worth while. 

The Church and religion will not pass out of 
American life while you have Cadmans. 


Lie 
cu 


rs. 
=" 


~ i 
nln ds 


ss 





Vil 
CHRISTIAN F. REISNER 


AN EXPONENT OF RELIGIOUS 
ADVERTISING 


G ENSATIONALISM in the pulpit—if there’s one 

thing more than another that injures the 
Church, today, in the minds of outside people, 
it’s that. 

When Christian F. Reisner made an engagement 
to meet me he said, “Drop in at the advertising 
club this afternoon. I have a committee meeting 
there today.” And it was there I first met him and 
talked with him. He is president of the Church 
Advertising Department of the Associated Adver- 
tising Clubs of the World. He makes no secret of 
the fact that he believes in church advertising. 

There is a form of pulpit sensationalism that is 
disgusting to the unchurched public. I have in mind 
a Bible verse which I remember from boyhood, 
“ And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
all men unto me.” It always seemed to me that, if 
this verse meant anything, pulpit sensationalism was 
useless nonsense. Whatever sensational preachers 
may think, people go to church to hear about re- 
ligion, and not to be amused. Dr. Reisner’s so- 
called sensationalism ends when he steps into the 
pulpit. It is a sacred rule with him to preach, or 
talk nothing else in his pulpit but religion. There 
is a great difference between his method and that of 
many preacher-sensationalists. 


VII 
CHRISTIAN F. REISNER 


ERE’S a man who stirs up things 
H wherever he goes. In order to tell the 
amazing truth about him and his work 
in this chapter, I must tell the whole truth. It 
is this: The stir he has made had confused me 
about him. As aman on the street I was con- 
stantly seeing in the newspapers that Dr. Reis- 
ner was doing this or doing that, saying this or 
saying that, fighting this cause or opposing that. 
My ideas about the famous clergyman were not 
very definite; they came to me through news- 
paper columns. But my impression of him was 
that he was a preacher who paid much attention 
to worldly things and did not emphasise the 
things that we folks from the worried paths of 
daily life go to church to hear. 

I must frankly admit that I have discovered 
my newspaper impressions of every great 
clergyman I have met in preparing this book to 
be utterly wrong. Meeting the men face to 
face, hearing them talk and finding out what 
they stood for and what they aimed at, changed 


101 


102 CHRISTIAN F. REISNER 


my early opinions in every case. These really 
great leaders have exactly that effect on men. 
When they come face to face with you you may 
then measure their greatness, their sincerity and 
their sympathy. All of your preconceived ideas 
fade away; the impressions you have received 
of them through hearsay and through reading 
are usually quickly altered. 

And so my views of Dr. Reisner, the man 
who always makes a stir, went glimmering, 
after I had got down to the hard pan of the 
man’s personality. 

His stir has a purpose behind it. I had been 
wrong in emphasising his stir. The thing that 
I got at was why he made the stir. 

I never saw less “religion” in a parson, 
among all those I have interviewed, than | 
found in Christian F. Reisner. Also, I never 
heard a parson use fewer “ you oughts,’ or 
“you ought nots.” He doesn’t fool with that 
weak word “ ought.” He uses “ must.” 

Here is a great preacher who says to thou- 
sands of persons weekly, ““ You must be a ser- 
vant of God.’ And he says this convincingly. 
Easy enough it might be for a man of lesser 
power to repeat these words in parrot-fashion 
and to find them meet with no response. 

_ But during twenty years of his life, in four 
different churches, not a Sunday has passed that 


Le ee 


ee ee ee ee 


ADVERTISING RELIGION 103 


Dr. Reisner has not taken new members into | 
his church. Over seven thousand of his fellow 
citizens in such widely separated places as Kan- 
sas, Colorado and New York City he has let 
into probation or into membership in the 
Methodist Church. The stir he makes is to 
attract men and women into the range of his 
persuasive “‘ must.” 

“Where did you find so many good people? ” 
I suggested to him. ‘ How do you pick them 
out?” I had in mind his thousands of church 
members. 

“Why, I wasn’t looking for good people,” he 
replied, with a great hearty laugh. “I hunt 
around only for people who want to be good.” 

And then he gave me the key to all his aston- 
ishingly successful work in church building. 

“What are good people, anyway?” he asked 
me. “ The Church doesn’t need good people. 
And I presume that good people don’t need the 
Church. Ive never been able to find any room 
in my work or my plans for people who were 
merely good. 

““Good people!’’ he exclaimed. ‘‘ When I 
meet folks who think they’re good, I can’t fit in 
with them. Folks who are just good are 
usually good for nothing. I’m looking for 
folks who are good for something.” 

Please, my readers, do not believe that I, 


104 CHRISTIAN F. REISNER 


as a man on the street, in interviewing some of 
the greatest clergymen in the United States, 
have escaped personal sermons, directed solely 
at myself. I have not told, in the various chap- 
ters I have written, all that some of these men 
have said; especially what they have said about 
my own personal responsibility in the matter 
of religion. 

But Dr. Reisner hit the closest home of all 
of them, for me, personally, as he continued his 
talk about ‘“ good people.” 

“No man who’s in his good senses,” he went 
on, snapping out his words, ‘‘ ever says ‘I can 
be as good out of the Church as I can in it.’ 
What does he mean by being ‘good’? That 
kind of goodness makes me sick. Make him 
change his sentence. Make him put it this way: 
“I can be as good for something outside of the 
Church as I can in it,’ and then ask him if that 
doesn’t sound silly? 

“You can’t be good for something outside of 
religion and the Church. The men who do 
things in this world are men who believe in God 
and who have His teachings as their back- 
ground and their faith in Him as their guide. 

“T put it coldly. A man cannot be a great 
man and not have a belief in God. To do great 
things in this world a man must be trying to 
serve God and his fellow men. If that isn’t his 


ADVERTISING RELIGION 105 


first and primary purpose then, no matter how 
high he seems to rise for a time, he’s bound to 
go down in wreckage. 

“Men must believe in God in order to 
achieve anything in this world. You can call 
that ‘religion’ if you want to. I call it neces- 
sity. It’s that portion of mankind that believes 
in God and tries to serve Him and fulfil His 
wishes that controls the destiny of nations. 
Men who do not believe in God and who do not 
try to work with Him can not be leaders of 
men. All history shows this. And a study of 
all the leaders of our present day proves it. 

“ Belief in God is the vital part of human 
greatness and all permanent human accomplish- 
ment. You can’t build anything in this world 
that will endure or that will sway men unless 
you build according to God’s plan and His 
guidance.” 

I’m giving his machine-gun talk straight out, 
as he gave it to me, but I cannot put into 
printed words the commanding assurance and 
authority with which he spoke. 

“My sole object, in all my life, has been to 
tell as many men and women as I can reach that 
they must serve God if they want their lives to 
be worth while, to be even worth living.” 

“And by ‘believing in God,’ what do you 
mean?’ I asked. 


106 CHRISTIAN F, REISNER 


He smiled. 

“Yes, I know what you’re driving at,” he 
said. “Il put it straight for you. I tell my 
people that they must believe in a personal God 
and must be personally accountable to Him. I 
tell them that He lives and is their Father ; that 
He loves them, every single one of them and 
that He will care for them, individually, each 
man and woman in the world who asks for His 
care and tries to serve Him. No, sir!” he em- 
phasised, “I don’t believe in any vague thing 
of goodness called God. I take the whole old- 
fashioned Methodist doctrine. I don’t ask peo- 
ple to serve a hazy thing called goodness. I 
don’t even ask them to be good. I tell them 
that the only way to live is to believe in a 
personal God and to love Him and let Him 
guide their lives. Goodness follows; not 
wishy-washy goodness, but goodness for 
something.” 

“You're good for something in this world— 
for service of some kind to your fellow men— 
or you're good for nothing.” Dr. Reisner says 
this over and over again. It’s what he tells his 
great crowds, after he has gathered them by the 
stir he makes. 

“You're a useless zero, without a belief in’ 
God.” That’s his message to the men and 
women who come within his range. 


ADVERTISING RELIGION 107 


It’s the kind of talk that comes very close 
home to the man on the street. Listen to it, as 
so many hundreds of thousands have done, and 
then go home and try to put into your own 
words the idea Dr. Reisner has got into your 
mind. It will seem to you as if he has talked 
right straight at you alone, perhaps. What did 
he say? You may not remember his exact 
words, but your impression will be something 
like this: 

“ He looked right down at me, straight into 
my face, and he said, ‘You poor, helpless 
blank! You poor zero! Here you are, trying 
to play your part in the world, in your little 
way. Here you are trying to keep your home 
clean and fine. Here you are trying to raise 
your children, your boys and girls, to be good 
and useful citizens. Here you are trying to be 
a useful citizen yourself, and you aren’t even 
started right. You never can succeed, the way 
you're going. If you want to do any of these 
things, if you want to carry out the simplest 
duties of parenthood or of good citizenship you 
must believe in God and in your accountability 
to Him. You must take Him as a personal God 
and ask Him to keep His eye on you and tell 
you what to do and how to go.” 

And then it may seem to you as if he had 
said : 


108 CHRISTIAN F. REISNER 


“Of course, if you think you haven’t any 
duties of any sort in this world; if you're not 
going to try to carry your end of the load and 
be a real man; if you’re going to dodge all re- 
sponsibilities and try to sneak through, living 
the life of a mere animal, without an effort to 
make either yourself or those around you any 
better, then, perhaps you can get along without 
God’s help. But, oh! what a despicable, useless 
thing you will be!” 

That’s what Dr. Reisner gives to you, in a 
talk, or in a sermon; that’s what he has given 
to the throngs that have heard him in various 
parts of the country for the past fifth of a 
century. 

The Christianity he preaches doesn’t have 
any easy way init. It isn’t any shelter from a 
storm; indeed, it may take you out into the 
storm. It isn’t any short-cut through life; it’s a 
path for sturdy feet. It isn’t a garden of rest: 
it’s a field of service where your spiritual mus- 
cles are always in use. It isn’t a place of sigh- 
ing sacrifice; it’s a place where you must do 
things for men, at great cost to yourself, taking 
your pay in the good coin of your God’s quiet 
“ Well done.” 

No, there’s nothing vague or wishy-washy in 
the Christianity that Dr. Reisner preaches. It’s 
a religion for you, for today, to help you in 


ADVERTISING RELIGION 109 


helping the world and thus escape having your 
own life useless. Heaven comes afterwards, 
but that takes care of itself, if you take care, 
as best you can, of God’s today. 

There’s no secret about Dr. Reisner’s success 
in bringing members into his church every Sun- 
day and in helping to sway and direct the lives 
of thousands of men and women in these 
United States. 

The secret of his success is his ‘ You must 
serve God,” with his persuasive warning 
against living a zero life. He takes people into 
his church to serve; he demands that they do 
something ; he finds work and service for them, 
when they cannot find it for themselves. 

He has come across an old secret of man’s 
contact with God and all the success he has had 
arises from the fact that he speaks with author- 
ity and that he points the way to service. 

His orthodox Methodism that makes a man’s 
contact with God intimate and personal, with 
no human intermediary, only adds to the 
strength of his methods. 

Frankly, I believe that the man on the street 
today, in America, is waiting for a religion 
that possesses authority. A_ religion that 
commands him, rather than one that gently 
and vaguely advises, is something that he can 
hang on to. 


110 CHRISTIAN F. REISNER 


I wonder if the preachers that are not afraid 
to show him the spiritual musts of life, rather 
than the vague oughts, are not the men that he 
is willing to listen to and to follow? ‘The 
“ought” is mushy; the “‘ must ” is concrete. 

I have shown you what Dr. Reisner believes 
and what he preaches. Now to get back to the 
somewhat disconcerting stir which he is con- 
stantly making. 

“If you've got a message you’ve got to get 
people together to listen to it,” he explained to 
me. “It would be a crime for me to gather a 
great audience by giving away roses or by hay- 
ing a noted secular speaker in my pulpit, if I 
preached anything but Christ and Him cruci- 
fied. I must get people into my church. I be- 
lieve in advertising to attract them. God helps 
me to do the rest. After I’ve got them into my 
church, I give them nothing but the baldest 
truths about religion. They may come into my 
church thinking about some trivial thing. They 
go out, if I am successful, thinking about the 
deepest things of life; thinking new things 
they’ll never forget.” _ 

Dr. Reisner was born and raised in a little 
town in Kansas. His father, John, borrowed 
money to send him to Midland College, at 
Atchison. The boy helped by working on a 
newspaper. When it came time to choose his 


ADVERTISING RELIGION 111 


life-calling, young Christian wanted to be a 
clergyman. 

“T don’t know why,” he told me. “I never 
did know. It just seemed to me to be the only 
thing I wanted to do.” 

There were hard times in the country then. 

The rugged old Kansas father borrowed 
money, at fifteen per cent. interest, to get his 
son started in the Boston University School of 
Theology. At twenty-four the fight for an 
education was over; the boy was ordained in 
the Methodist Episcopal Church. 

He took a little church in the packing-house 
district at Kansas City, Kansas. The member- 
ship was made up of a very small group of 
packing-house employees, with their families. 
He stayed there six years. Today a one hun- 
dred thousand dollar church is being built by 
that congregation, after a recent fire. That 
packing-house church has given three profes- 
sors to American colleges. 

In Denver Dr. Reisner built up a great con- 
gregation by his methods of attracting audi- 
ences and enlisting members. 

When he was called to Grace Church, in New 
York City, that famous old institution had been 
labouring under a twenty thousand dollar debt 
for over twenty years. It was part of the 
original building debt! Dr. Reisner, within a 


112 CHRISTIAN F. REISNER 


short time, raised seventy thousand dollars, 
paid off the debt, spent twenty thousand dollars 
in refurnishing the church and established the 
nucleus of a fund for meeting overhead ex- 
penses of the church. 

Now, with Grace Church well on its feet, he’s 
starting off again. 

There’s a church on the upper end of Man- 
hattan Island, known as Chelsea Church. It’s 
in a district that has grown so rapidly with the 
development of high-class apartment houses 
that no one has even had time to establish a 
large church there. 

Dr. Reisner is there now. Crowds are hear- 
ing him. Poor, crowded New Yorkers—busi- 
ness men and high-salaried folks—dwellers 
in the thousands of marble-halled, elevator- 
equipped apartments in that district, crowd into 
the church to listen to Dr. Reisner’s formula 
for making life worth while. 

They come from all over the country, these 
New Yorkers. 

“Some of them haven’t heard old-fashioned 
sermons for years,’ explains Dr. Reisner. 
“Sometimes I feel more like a missionary to 
them than a clergyman with a charge.” 

“ I want to build up at least one more great 
church,” this amazing clergyman told me. “I 
want to turn this hole-in-the-ground church into 


ADVERTISING RELIGION 113 


a mighty institution, where thousands can 
serve God.” 

Within a few months after Dr. Reisner first 
conceived his idea of a great towering church 
building in New York he had collected over one 
million dollars toward the project. At this 
writing his amazing dream of a Twentieth 
Century church building, to cost $4,000,000 
and to house, under its sky-scraping roof and 
its thirty-foot lighted cross, hundreds of apart- 
ment dwellers, many of whom will attend and 
help to support the great church within the 
great structure seems well on the way toward 
realisation. It is his dream to have the bells 
and the steeples of at least one church stand out 
with the tips of the greatest business structures 
on the sky-line of an American city. That’s 
advertising with him; keeping people from 
forgetting. 

And that’s Reisner. You can forgive the stir 
he makes, after you understand it—and see re- 
sults. He’s not trying to make good people; 
he’s trying to make people good for something. 
And he shows them the way. 


‘i 


i it hy 





VIII 


CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


AN ORATOR WHO PREACHES TO 
THE HEART 


at MENTAL laziness in the pulpit” and “ laxness 

in the preparation of sermons” have been 
mentioned in another note in this book. No one 
could have come in contact with eleven famous 
clergymen, as I did, and have asked them such 
direct questions as I asked, without discovering that 
these things exist in the American pulpit, and that 
they are known to exist. 

Dr. Jefferson’s feelings about weak and mediocre 
preaching are made very evident in this chapter 
that deals with him and his work. But a pleasant 
discovery is hidden away in what Dr. Jefferson told 
me of his life. The so-called little preacher, the 
obscure preacher, need not be a mediocre preacher ; 
he may be a man of great power and hidden 
influence. 

Buried deep in Dr. Jefferson’s story is a little- 
known preacher whose name, to Dr. Jefferson, is 
Tom Johnson. He speaks it endearingly. Of the 
three charges which this great clergyman, Jefferson, 
has held during his career, he was directed to two 
by Thomas Johnson, a Methodist minister. To 
Thomas Johnson, wherever he is today, America 
probably owes the great Broadway Tabernacle; it 
was being built by Dr. Jefferson while Thomas 
Johnson was quietly serving in out-of-the-way 
Methodist churches of New England. I take this to 
mean that not all of a clergyman’s work consists of 
preaching. 


VIII 
CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


OT many years ago I was a young fel- 

low who had just come to New York. 

It isn’t so long ago that I have forgot- 

ten the thrill of it. A room in a little hotel; 

theatres now and then; the work at the office; 

an evening walk through bright Broadway; no 

one to tell you when to eat or what to eat—or 

when to go to bed—that was a fine life, for a 

little while. I was trying my shingle, to see 
whether it would float me. 

Of course a young fellow gets homesick, now 
and then, in New York. And of all the cures 
for homesickness, Broadway is the worst. 
Broadway doesn’t cure homesickness any more 
than cold draughts cure a cold or goldenrod 
cures hay fever. 

And yet, on Broadway, one evening I found 
a cure for a boy’s homesickness that I used to 
take every now and then when the sickness was 
too heavy. It was a church—on Broadway! 
It was not far from the brightest lights. I 
remember one bright sign near by used to flash 


117 


118 CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


out the time, once a minute. “8:53. Time for 
a Wilson’s Highball. That’s all.” There was 
the old electric advertising sign of the Ben Hur 
chariot race; very remotely that used to remind 
me of the gentler things of life—and home. 

But there on Broadway, I found a church. 
It had no steeple like a church. I don’t know to 
this day where its bells are. I suppose it does 
have bells, but I have never heard them ring, 
because I’m never on Broadway—and very few 
other people are—on a Sunday. It was a great, 
beautiful, massive structure of brick, with a 
huge tower, surmounted by a pyramid that 
might almost be a brother to the pyramids of 
E.gypt. 

I noticed the building because on its front, up 
against the walls, flashing out with the whiskey 
signs and the theatre advertisements, was a 
Cross. I went into that church on Broadway 
that night, I think, to see what a church that 
didn’t look like a church would be like. 

But as soon as I entered I found it was just 
like church at home. The sermon was very 
simple; it had the sort of thing in it that told a 
young fellow that life couldn’t be all theatres 
and whiskey and flashing lights. The words 
the man in the pulpit used were very short 
words; but powerful; they were wonderfully 
arranged. And the strong voice was more 


MASTER OF ORATORY 119 


resonant and pleasing than the voices of some 
of the greatest actors along that famous street 
of elocution. 

I went more than once to hear this square- 
faced, sturdy man, in his simple but thrilling 
oratory, tell people how to live. He was as 
great an orator as I had ever heard. That. was 
a dozen years ago. I have since then heard 
some famous statesmen deliver orations on 
some mighty themes—Lord Kitchener, in the 
British Parliament; Lloyd George, at the Paris 
Peace Conference; Clemenceau, the hurler of 
polished steel words; Woodrow Wilson, in the 
Clock Room at the Quai D’Orsay, in Paris, at 
the highest moment, perhaps, of his life, when 
he delivered to the world the covenant of the 
League of Nations in an oration never to be 
forgotten. And yet of all the orators I have 
ever heard, expounding the vastest themes, I 
can not remember one who has thrilled me more 
than this sturdy man who used to speak on the 
theme of how to live rightly, in the Broadway 
Tabernacle in my early days, who speaks there 
now, and who, after twenty-five years of speak- 
ing there, promises to fill that famous pulpit for 
many years more. 

I hasten to agree with my readers that mere 
oratory in the pulpit is worse than silence. A 
preacher who has no more to offer to a soul- 


120 CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


sick world than pretty words, charmingly ac- 
cented, in a pleasant voice, is worse than no 
preacher at all; he’s no medicine for soul- 
worry; he’s only a picture of a medicine bottle. 
_ But the oratory of Charles Edward Jefferson 
was not the main thing in his preaching; it was 
an added thing; added to a religion that reached 
the heart. 

When I went to talk to him, not long ago, in 
that same great pile of a building in Broadway 
at Fifty-sixth Street, I had not heard him for 
over a dozen years; and never before had I met 
him at close range. I wanted to know about 
him; what kind of a man he was, and how he 
became that kind of a man. 

I realized, before I got to his study in the 
church, that he was a big man, with big ideas, 
Perhaps you picture his study, as I had—a quiet 
group of rooms, off from the dimly lighted 
empty church. But it was not like that. When 
I went through the doorway, off of Broadway, 
that opens into the famous pyramid-topped 
tower, which is one of the foothills of the 
mountainous sky-line of the city, I found an 
elevator. | 

I couldn’t be sure I was in a church building ; 
this might have been the entrance to any of the 
buildings along New York’s automobile row, in 
which the famous old tabernacle now stands. 


MASTER OF ORATORY 121 


“Ts this the Broadway Tabernacle? ”’ I asked 
the coloured elevator man. 

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,’ he answered. 

When I told him I wanted to see Dr. Jeffer- 
son, he shot the elevator up to the sixth floor. 
On the way up, I asked questions. 

“Ts this all church?” I asked him. 

“Yes, indeed,” he said proudly. “ This is 
all the Broadway Tabernacle.” 

“Does the church rent out offices? ’’ I asked. 
It was hard to imagine a church filling a great 
Broadway building like this. 

“No, sir,’ he said, emphatically. “ The 
church folks keep this building busy enough.” 

We stopped at the sixth floor. 

“How many more floors are there?” I 
asked. 

“Two more,” he said. “It’s a mighty big 
church.” | | 

He was right. All of the thousands of visi- 
tors, from all over the United States, who have 
ever come to visit the famous Tabernacle in 
Broadway will agree with him. 

I was on my way to meet the man who had 
dreamed and planned and built this church. 
He surely had built largely. 

When I found his study, I discovered it 
was really a study—big chairs, a fireplace, 
hundreds of books, and a big roll-top desk. 


122 CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


And there sat the square little man, looking 
out through the window, over the roof of the 
church auditorium, toward where the evening 
lights of Broadway were already beginning 
to glow. 

Within a few minutes we were deep in talk. 
I was after the “why” of his life. How do 
great business men, who build mighty things, 
happen? How do they come out of obscurity 
of life, among the rest of us humdrum folks, 
and erect their monuments? How did it hap- 
pen that this man-builder of this great church, 
teacher of hundreds of thousands of Ameri- 
cans, through his lectures and books as well as 
his sermons, came up out of the general average 
to be what he is today? 

It was as simple and plain a story he told me 
as I have ever heard in my life; that is, simple, 
as he told it, in his one-syllable words, with his 
pleasant smile. 

He was a schoolboy who went off to the 
University from his little home town—and 
never got back home again. He never had the 
discouraging experience of the college boy, 
who, after he is graduated, goes back home to 
the folks, sticks away his diploma, and then 
worries about what he is going to do in the 
world. 

Charles Edward Jefferson was knee-deep in 


MASTER OF ORATORY 123 


affairs of the world before he had finished his 
university course; the world never did let him 
get back home, except for short visits to the 
little town of Cambridge, Ohio. 

Here’s how it was, as he told it to me, in hts 
study overtopping Broadway. 

“My parents wanted me to study law,” he 
said. “I suppose that was because I was an 
orator. When I graduated from the high 
school, I was the class valedictorian. JI went to 
Ohio Wesleyan University, and there are folks 
there yet, perhaps, who will remember some of 
my speeches and orations—though they may 
not remember what I spoke about, or what I 
had to say. 

“The year I was graduated from Wesleyan, 
I went to Worthington, Ohio, a little town then, 
to teach school. For two years I had the title 
of superintendent of public schools. 

“ While I was in Worthington I had classes 
in elocution in the Ohio Wesleyan University 
and in the Ohio State University, at Columbus. 

“T suppose I was a pretty good orator,” he 
said, laughing. 

“In 1884 I went off to Boston to attend the 
law school of Boston University. 

“T was unspeakably unhappy in Boston. 
Here I was on the verge of life, but I could 
not seem to get into touch with the real 


124 CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


things of life. I may have been an orator, 
but I couldn’t find anything in the law to orate 
about. It seemed unreal. And I wanted real 
things. 

“| had been raised in a Christian home, but 
I had forgotten much of my religion in school. 
I suppose my gift of oratory had made me es- 
pecially critical of preaching. I had lost inter- 
est in the Church, because I could see how 
carelessly many clergymen preached. I could 
see that they had been lax in preparing their 
sermons. I could trace mental laziness in their 
preaching, and I had lost patience with the 
pulpit. I was getting oratory and preaching 
confused. 

“ One Sunday evening I went to Old Trinity 
Church, in Boston, to hear Phillips Brooks. 
He was one of the greatest orators of his day, 
among all those great clergymen of the Boston 
of that day. And behind his oratory was a fire 
of belief in Christ. Oratory came second with 
him ; his great conviction came first. He was a 
man who had something to talk about. 

“ All my prejudices against the pulpit went 
from me, as I heard Phillips Brooks. He was 
proof that the religion of Jesus Christ is worthy 
of the humble services of the greatest talents 
that a man may possess. 

“In those days in Boston, sick of the law, I 


MASTER OF ORATORY 125 


could hardly wait for Sunday to come around 
so that I might hear Brooks. He made my 
spirit hungry. I went to hear other great 
preachers in that city, and I decided that there 
could be nothing more important in life for me 
to do than to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
I took as the motto of my life—‘ For other 
foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
which is Jesus Christ.’ And all my life since 
then I have lived by that motto.” 

He stopped a minute, and smiled to himself. 

“Do you know,” he said, after the pause, 
“that I believe I have done a thing that no 
preacher before me has ever done? I have 
preached thirty-five different sermons on that 
one verse. Once every year I take that verse as 
a text. I have never missed a year. That was 
the text of the first sermon I ever preached. It 
would be the text of my final sermon, if I could 
have my way. 

“In that verse is the fundamental bed-rock 
truth of the entire Bible and of the religion of 
all Christendom.” 

And so, in mid-stream of his university life, 
the young man shifted from the law school to 
the school of theology in the Boston University. 
He didn’t ask the advice of the folks back home 
—his father and mother. 

“TI think they would have been greatly 


126 CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


surprised and perhaps disappointed if they 
had known what I was planning to do,” Dr. 
Jefferson told me, smilingly. While he was 
studying theology and planning his life on his 
new motto, he studied elocution under three 
masters. 

Is it any wonder that this writer, with thou- 
sands of other young men, who, during the past 
quarter of a century have found their way to 
the Broadway ‘Tabernacle, have been thrilled 
by the eloquence of that preacher ? 

“Do you know Tom Johnson?” Dr. Jeffer- 
son suddenly:asked me. 

“The man who was Mayor of Cleveland?” I 
asked. 

“Oh, no,” he said. ‘“ He’s a Methodist 
preacher. He used to be in Ohio. I think he’s 
preaching somewhere in New England now. 
He never tried to take any big charges. He 
always seemed content to preach to folks in 
out-of-the-way places. 

“That Methodist minister has had a tre- 
mendous influence over my life. In some way, 
while I was in Boston, he heard that a church 
in FitzWilliam, New Hampshire, needed a 
pastor. I don’t believe I ever did hear how he 
made that discovery. But he wrote a letter to 
the officials of that church telling them that 
there was a young man in Boston who ought to 


MASTER OF ORATORY 127 


be their pastor. I was given the position; it 
was a little church in the summer resort district. 

“ Some time later he heard that the Congre- 
gational Church at Chelsea, Massachusetts, 
needed a pastor. He wrote a letter to the of- 
ficials of that church also. 

“Tt was an interesting letter. He said in it 
that I was one of the greatest young orators in 
the country—silver-tongued. The officials of 
the church went over the list of applicants for 
the place, and one of them, picking up Tom 
Johnson’s letter, said laughingly: ‘ Let’s investi- 
gate this silver-tongued wonder that this man 
writes about.’ And so they investigated me 
and called me to the pulpit of that great Con- 
sregational church. 

“T went back to Cambridge, Ohio, to marry 
the girl of my home days, and we settled down 
in the Chelsea district. For ten years and a 
half I was the pastor in the Chelsea church. 

“And then, in 1898, I was called to the 
Broadway Tabernacle. 

“And I have been here, ever since,” he 
added. ‘‘ Only three churches—and Thomas 
Johnson found me two of them.” 

There are a few churches in the United 
States that are national institutions. Boston 
has several; Washington, the capital, has two 
or three, and so have New York and Brooklyn. 


128 CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


Broadway Tabernacle is one of the most 
famous of our national churches, and it was 
with this big viewpoint that Dr. Jefferson built 
it, and has kept it going at full and mighty 
blast. When a Congregationalist finds himself 
in New York on a Sunday he turns to this 
famous old church, thrilled at the sight of the 
blazing cross and thrilled by the eloquence of 
the great preacher. 

But it has cost a mighty effort to keep Brose: 
way Tabernacle going at full blast. It isn’t an 
easy thing to keep a church running on 
Broadway. 

It was a long-lighted torch that was handed 
to Charles Jefferson when he was called to the 
pulpit of the Tabernacle. He was only thirty- 
seven years old. Before him, in the history of 
the congregation, had come four preachers. 
One of these, Dr. Joseph P. Thompson, had 
served for twenty-six years. Another, Dr. 
William A. Taylor, had served twenty-one 
years. These were names that were almost 
sacred to the young preacher. Into his hands 
had been put the results of the life-work of 
these two famous clergymen. 

“ Here’s a torch that must be kept alight,” 
said the young clergyman. 

But the light was flickering. The church 
was known, at that time, as the Thirty-fourth 


MASTER OF ORATORY 129 


Street Tabernacle. It was situated in the busi- 
ness district, because, in the sweep of change in 
New York City, the business district had grown 
around it. People who went to church there 
were forced to take the same long trip on a 
Sunday morning or evening that they took on 
week-days to go to their business. 

Once, before, in the history of the church, it 
had been moved. In its early days—in the 
forties—the church had stood in Worth Street ; 
business buildings had surrounded it and driven 
out the residents, and Dr. Joseph T. Thompson 
had moved the church to Thirty-fourth Street. 

It had stood there for almost half-a-century 
when young Jefferson took charge of it. But 
he folded the tent and moved. 

‘tae told ’.ns) what kind)of a) church {he 
wanted,’ Dr. Lucien Warner, an old-time mem- 
ber of the Tabernacle, told me, “‘ and we felt 
we had to get it for him. He told us what 
rooms he wanted—classrooms for the young 
folks and for men and women; offices for dif- 
ferent purposes. 

“We looked over the ground and over his 
plans and we saw that the only way we could 
get what he wanted was to build into the air. 
Before we got through we had an eight-story 


building at the corner of Fifty-sixth Street and 
Broadway.” 


130 CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


That was in 1905. The Tabernacle has the 
largest membership today that it has ever had. 
In one respect it is like a country church, be- 
cause its members must come such vast dis- 
tances. At every service, of course, there are 
visitors from every corner of the United States. 
But it might interest these visitors to know that 
the members of this church, sitting in the audi- 
ence with them, have come, some of them, from 
homes twenty or thirty miles away. Persons 
who live fully one hundred miles apart, meet 
regularly at the services. 

Like the old country parson who, on his 
horse, made a day’s journey for a visit to a 
death-bed, so this parson of the great church on 
Broadway, finds his parishioners so far apart 
that it is sometimes a day’s trip, in the fastest 
suburban trains, to reach one end of his par- 
ish and to return. 

It’s hard to keep any Protestant church going 
on Manhattan Island. Two and a quarter mil- 
lion people live on the island, but only 177,500 
are Protestant church members. 

On Manhattan Island—Dr. Jefferson, him- 
self, has compiled these figures, with the aid of 
his assistants, who are constantly studying the 
New York church problem—on Manhattan 
Island, English is the mother tongue of only 
one hundred and ten thousand people! Less 


MASTER OF ORATORY 131 


than one person in every fifteen on Manhattan 
speaks English by birthright. German is the 
mother-tongue of two hundred thousand; Ital- 
ian or Greek of four hundred and thirty thou- 
sand, while Hebrew is the mother-tongue of 
five hundred and thirty-nine thousand. Man- 
hattan is the largest Jewish city which has ever 
existed on this planet. Over one million Jews 
have come to New York since Dr. Jefferson 
took charge of the Broadway Tabernacle; and 
there are thirty-six fewer Protestant churches 
now than then. Ninety-three Protestant 
churches have literally died in Manhattan since 
the opening of this century. 

A strange parish, this. Time and again Dr. 
Jefferson’s aids have scoured the neighbour- 
hood of the church, looking for Protestant 
young people. 

“Tt is amazing,” he says, “how few Prot- 
estant boys and girls there are within a mile of 
this church.” 

These are facts about this great task that 
Jefferson realises, as he stands in his pulpit in 
Broadway and throws all the power of his ora- 
tory into a summons to Christianity. 

“T often think of my early dreams,” he says. 
“T dreamed of being the pastor of a village 
church, somewhere among the hills of New 
England. I pictured myself in an earthly para- 


132 CHARLES E. JEFFERSON 


dise in which I should have a group of earnest 
people gathered round me week after week, 
whose religious education I could superintend 
through the years, and whose lives I could by 
faith and prayer and patient labour intertwine 
into a bundle of life through which the Spirit 
of the Eternal might work on the temper and 
conduct of the community. I was to study in 
the quiet of the fields and to write my sermons 
in the silence of undisturbed mornings, and de- 
liver my messages unmolested by the noises of 
the world, and do all my work in blessed tran- 
quillity. And, after all this air-castle building, 
think of my settling down for twenty-five years 
of my life on Broadway, ‘the most discour- 
aging and hopeless situation in the whole world 
to induce men to think of God and the soul.’ ”’ 

In his sermon celebrating his twenty-fifth an- 
niversary, Dr. Jefferson told his audience these 
things, and then he said: “ But I have had the 
wind in my face so long that I do not mind it. 
I have rowed against the stream so many years 
that I find it quite exhilarating. 

But while he rows, and while the winds blow, 
he still finds energy remaining with which to 
help thousands of folks—young folks, for in- 
stance, away from home, on that weird, strange, 
magnetic island of Manhattan. 





IX 


BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


A BISHOP WHO AIMS TO CHRISTIANISE 
INSTITUTIONS 


[% American pulpits there are some great clergy- 
men who preach personal religion. I find there 
are others who do not emphasise personal religion, 
but strive to make Christianity a great, compelling 
force in American institutions. They would Chris- 
tianise not only individuals, but civilisation itself. 

It happened that the only two bishops with whom 
I talked—Bishop Francis J. McConnell, of the 
Methodist Episcopal church, and Bishop Charles 
David Williams, of the Protestant Episcopal church 
—both had this viewpoint. 

“ Accept Christianity for yourselves, and then in- 
troduce it into your labour unions, so that they will 
be inspired by Christian motives ”’—this, in sub- 
stance, was Bishop McConnell’s advice to labour. 
“ Christianise capital, by becoming Christians your- 
selves and by using the philosophy of Christianity 
in all your dealings ’—in so many words you might 
put his message to the institution of capitalism and 
its members. 

“Don’t criticise the Church for not helping you,” 
he would say to labour. “Come into the church and 
make it strong enough to help you.” 

“Don’t criticise the Church for not getting the 
viewpoint of capital,” he would say to the capital- 
ists. ‘Make yourselves worthy and acceptable 
members of the Church, look at capitalism through 
the eyes of Christians, and then the Church may 
have an opportunity to understand your viewpoint.” 

A missionary to American institutions—that’s 
what I found Bishop McConnell to be. As an on- 
looker I took it as a significant fact that the Church 
had found a niche of great importance and power 
for a man of Bishop McConnell’s purposes and aims. 


IX 
BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


\ ' YHEREVER you went in Mexico in the 


days I was there, whether you were a 

business man, a miner or a newspaper 
correspondent, you heard men ask, “ Have you 
ever met McConnell? He'll tell you all about 
Mexico.” 

In many different towns in Mexico and in the 
several clubs in Mexican towns where American 
men gather I heard McConnell’s name. 

“Who is McConnell?” I asked one old timer. 

“Why, he’s the Methodist Bishop of Mex- 
ico,” he replied. “ He travels over the place 
more than any business man I know and he gets 
more inside information about local conditions 
everywhere than any other American. He 
knows about the Mexican people and what 
they’re thinking.” 

This writer was never lively enough to catch 
up with the bishop whom everyone called by his 
last name, without any title, in the wide, sparse 
land of Mexico. Traveling was difficult ; trains 
were blown up now and then; bridges were 


135 


136 BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


burned down. Now and then some American 
coming into the American club in Mexico City 
from some faraway corner of the land would 
tell of having seen McConnell in his parts, re- 
cently. Everything you heard about Bishop 
McConnell was to the effect that he was on the 
move. flow he moved, I never could discover. 
But through all the wildest days in Mexico— 
when Madero was unseated and Pancho Villa 
was running amok—this Methodist Bishop got 
around from church to church somehow, brac- 
ing up his Mexican Methodist clergymen and 
hoping, with them, for happier days in their up- 
set land, and advising the thirty or more Ameri- 
can clergymen in the larger cities and towns. He 
was being a bishop in every sense of the word, 
no matter how topsy-turvy things might go. 

The Methodist Episcopal Church did not go 
topsy-turvy in Mexico, in those days. Bishop 
McConnell—I’ve caught up with him at last 
since then and had more than one long talk with 
him—does not believe in the Church ever going 
topsy-turvy, in spite of how the rest of the 
world may go. 

I heard one thing about Bishop McConnell in 
Mexico, in those days, that aroused my curios- 
ity about the man. 

Old timers—Americans who had been in 
business in Mexico for many years—told me 


A PREACHER UNAFRAID 137 


that whenever a Methodist minister in Mexico 
declared himself in favour of American inter- 
vention, Bishop McConnell sent that clergyman 
back home to the United States. 

In other words, the Methodist Episcopal 
Bishop in Mexico was a non-interventionist and 
he not only talked non-intervention but he acted 
it. Some Americans in Mexico liked this; 
others didn’t. 

But the point that you noted was this: No 
matter what folks thought about him, Bishop 
McConnell wasn’t afraid of public opinion; he 
wasn't afraid to put his Church, out-and-out, 
on a platform that everyone could understand. 
While Bishop McConnell was in Mexico the 
Methodist Episcopal Church was a friend of 
the Mexican people—and the Mexican people 
knew it. 

You heard other things about “ McConnell ” ; 
they all went to prove that, whatever else he 
might be, he was not afraid of men or things. 
And it takes that kind of a man to do things in 
‘a land like Mexico, whether he’s mining or 
drilling for oil or being a bishop. 

A thousand miles from Mexico I finally came 
across Bishop Francis McConnell for the first 
time. He was on the famous Boardwalk at 
Atlantic City. 

His face was smooth-shaven; his hair iron- 


1388 BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


grey. The cut of his clothes was good and he 
might have passed as a successful man of busi- 
ness in any club in America. Then he was in 
his forties; today he is only fifty-two. 

He outspoke me in Spanish in a minute. 
When I told-him how I had tried to catch up 
with him in Mexico he smiled and said, ‘“ Well, 
I had to move around a great deal in those 
days.” 

We talked Mexico for half an hour. It was 
easy to see that he was a man who would 
always know and understand fully every job 
that came to his hand. 

I had talked to hundreds of business men in 
Mexico who knew much about Mexico. But, 
in speaking with Bishop McConnell, I discov- 
ered a new viewpoint. The business men knew 
Mexico, but Bishop McConnell knew the Mexi- 
can people. And what made him most different 
from most of my informants was that he not 
only knew the Mexican people but he loved 
them. He thought of them as human beings; 
some of them as fellow Methodists. 

He looked at Mexico and the Mexican prob- 
lem through the eyes of a Christian. He saw 
the rights of the Mexican people. And that 
was what he had been fighting for in Mexico. 
When he had sent a clergyman home to the 
United States it was because he felt that the 


A PREACHER UNAFRAID 139 


clergyman was not seeing Mexico through 
Christian eyes. 

“We ought to Christianise our international 
relations; put the paganism out of them.” 
That was the belief on which Bishop McCon- 
nell acted in Mexico. 

There were more important things to talk 
about that day on the Boardwalk—more up-to- 
date things—though I didn’t know about it at 
the time. I discovered it, however, the next 
morning, in the newspapers. 

McConnell, the Bishop from Mexico, was on 
the front pages in big headlines. 

A great gathering of churchmen of all de- 
nominations had brought the young bishop to 
Atlantic City. 

Throughout the Eastern States a great strike 
was under way in the steel factories. Readers 
of newspapers had tremendous difficulty in dis- 
covering what it was all about; it was hard for 
the public to get facts about either side in the 
gigantic dispute. 

The churchmen in Atlantic City appointed 
a committee to investigate the strike. And 
Bishop McConnell was made the head of this 
committee. 

The newspapers told the story on the 
morning I mention. Bishop McConnell had 
plunged into his job of investigation with all 


140 BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


his might; his committee had followed him 
bravely. 

And the committee reported that one prob- 
able cause of the strike was that thousands of 
men were forced to work in the steel mills seven 
days a week and twelve hours a day. ‘This was 
news to the American public. 

What’s more, the committee didn’t believe it 
was right for any American business man or 
any American corporations to force human be- 
ings to toil like this. It took from such op- 
pressed men all chance to worship; it took from 
them all faith in God and man. 

Bishop McConnell wanted the churches to go 
to the rescue of the overworked men in the steel 
mills. It was the same brave voice that he 
raised in Mexico. He wanted to show the 
people that the church would be their friend in 
the every day trials of their lives; in their fight 
for bread and butter. 

That was four years ago. 

Since then a President of the United States, 
speaking in the White House to a group of steel 
manufacturers, helped them to find a way to 
wipe the seven-day week and the twelve-hour 
day out of American industrial life. He said it 
was a shame to have men work like that in 
America. 

And still later—too late for Warren G. 


A PREACHER UNAFRAID 141 


Harding to be present in this world—the great 
steel manufacturers announced, with honest and 
evident pleasure and pride, that they had found 
a way to abolish the long day and the long week. 

I’m not saying that it was the report of 
Bishop McConnell’s committee that brought 
this action about, though it helped. 

I’m only telling the story to indicate two facts 
about Bishop Francis J. McConnell. One is 
that he is not afraid of criticism. The other is 
that he believes in using the church to help 
downtrodden people wherever he finds them. 

“Industry ought to be Christianised,” he told 
me, as we talked about the steel committee re- 
port in Brooklyn recently. 

That’s the key to the man; he wants every- 
thing Christianised. 

In talking with these eminent clergymen of 
many Protestant creeds, I have, as a layman, 
been astonished at their variety, and the variety 
of their aims. It is remarkable how many dif- 
ferent kinds of jobs the Churches of America 
have for their leaders to do; necessary jobs that 
must be done, if the Church is to hold its own in 
American life. I find, in fact, that every leader 
is doing something a little different from any 
other leader; filling his own niche and no 
other’s. Perhaps that’s what makes them 
leaders. 


142 BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


This is markedly the case with Bishop Fran- 
cis J. McConnell. - Like other leaders I have 
met—John Roach Straton, David James Bur- 
rell, Harry Emerson Fosdick—he has his own 
individual niche in American Protestantism; 
he has found his kind of a job to do, and is 
doing it. 

I'll have to go to the sea, to a warship, to get 
a picture that will illustrate Bishop McConnell, 
as an onlooker might see him. 

On every battleship there are men whose 
jobs have nothing to do with fighting, ex- 
cept indirectly. They care for the great 
furnaces and see that they are fed with oil. 
They watch the machinery and keep it operat- 
ing perfectly. They keep the ship clean and 
sanitary. ‘They keep it ready for use at the 
drop of a hat. 

There’s another man on shipboard who has 
another duty than theirs. His duty is to use the 
ship, when occasion requires. He doesn’t 
stoke; he doesn’t clean machinery. 

He uses the ship as an instrument. 

You find before talking very long with 
Bishop McConnell that his particular job, as he 
sees it, is to use the Church as an instrument. 

He takes it for granted that the Church is not 
badly out of order; that, as an institution, it is 
in working shape. Anyhow there are men and 


A PREACHER UNAFRAID 143 


women in the Church, millions of them, who 
will keep it going. - 

What he sees is the need of using this instru- 
ment out in the world of affairs. That was 
what he was trying to do in Mexico; what he 
was trying to do in connection with the steel 
strike. 

You lose a sense of the importance of your 
own particular soul when you talk with Bishop 
McConnell. 

I imagine that the two opposites in American 
Protestantism are “ Billy’ Sunday and Bishop 
McConnell. Your own individual soul and its 
welfare—how to set it straight and keep it 
going so—is the matter that you would discuss 
with Billy Sunday. The approach of Bishop 
McConnell would be different. 

“The people of the world need a friend,” he 
would tell you. “ Never mind your own wor- 
ries. Come on out into the world with me and 
let’s help the underdogs. Here’s the Church of 
Christ. Let’s make it our tool and instrument. 
Whenever we see any one in trouble we will use 
the power of the Church to help him and prove 
to him that the Church, like Christ, is his 
friend.” 

He looks out from his place, this bishop, like 
a man in a watchtower onto a stormy sea, seek- 
ing for people in distress. He knows that his 


144 BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


boat—the Church—can help them. He will not 
be worried, if he puts out on the waves, about 
his own welfare in the boat or the welfare of 
those who are helping him; he will not be wor- 
rying about whether the boat will stand the 
storm. He-knows it will. But he will be wor- 
rying about the welfare of those he has started 
out to aid. 

To the man on the street, outside of the 
Church, Bishop McConnell is one of the most 
striking and interesting figures in Protestant- 
ism. This perhaps, for one reason, is because, 
in his mind and feelings, he is out on the street 
himself. 

The man on the street in America under- 
stands the evangelism of Billy Sunday very 
clearly ; it is a personal evangelism. 

By the same token I believe that the man 
on the street in America who knows Bishop 
McConnell can understand him clearly; per- 
haps better than can some of the members of 
the churches who emphasise individuality in 
religion. 

I can imagine Bishop McConnell on a plat- 
form like Billy Sunday. But his audience 
would be different. In that audience would sit 
not men and women, worried about the welfare 
of their individual souls. Grouped before him, 
if he could have his way, would be the gigantic 


A PREACHER UNAFRAID 145 


distorted figures of all the great institutions 
which humanity has created in its social rela- 
tions or which have grown up in modern 
civilisation. 

Before him would sit the figure of Educa- 
tion, with its irresistible power over men and 
women. In his audience there would sit the 
figure of International Relations, creases of 
hate and jealousy and envy lining its face. 
There would sit Industry and Finance and La- 
bour. Here would sit Politics, two-faced and 
sneaking. 

Here would be the Stage and Art and Litera- 
ture; the institutions of Home, Patriotism, 
Music. 

The figure of every activity that men know 
would be in that audience. 

“T have brought you here,’ this Bishop 
would say, “to tell you that while men and 
women are being Christianised in the world to- 
day, you, as institutions, are not being Chris- 
tianised. So far as you, as institutions of 
mankind are concerned, Christ might never 
have been born. There is paganism in you. 
You are pagan. You, Education, care for the 
minds of children but not for their souls. You, 
Industry, and Finance, are greedy. You, La- 
bour, need education and understanding. You, 
Drama, sometimes degrade men. You, Art, 


146 BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


and you, Literature, often do the same. You, 
Patriotism, need some of Christ’s love for the 
other fellow.” 

It is to have these institutions of men, which 
guide and direct the lives of us all, “hit the 
saw-dust trail’? that Bishop McConnell is 
working. 

He’d have them apologise to humanity in all 
lands for the evils they have worked on men 
and women. And he’d have them “sign the 
card” promising to try to follow Christ 
throughout the rest of eternity. 

In my latest talk with Bishop McConnell we 
sat in the great assembly hall of a Brooklyn 
church, where the bishops of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church from all over the world had 
been in session. Flags decorated the walls; a 
vase of flowers stood on every desk; behind 
every desk was a great easy chair. On every 
desk was a small frame, bearing, in black let- 
ters, the name of the bishop who, during the 
sessions, sat in that seat. The session, which 
had closed for the day, had been secret. In the 
hallway, outside, a dozen New York news- 
paper reporters were cornering every bishop, as 
he left the room, to ask about the news of the 
meeting. Here was a bishop just come from 
Russia ; another from Germany, one from Mex- 
ico and others from other corners of the earth. 


A PREACHER UNAFRAID 147 


“What had the bishops done about danc- 
ing?’ I heard one reporter ask. 

“What had the bishops done about sending 
money to the Russian church?” asked another. 

On a seat inside the hall we talked for an 
hour—long after all the other bishops had gone. 

“What a power!” said Bishop McConnell, 
as he waved a hand toward the array of empty 
seats. “ What a power, if we only learn how 
to use it! 

“The Church is an instrument to do things 
with; to do things that the world needs done. 
It is the greatest power in the world, if we 
only use it. 

“The whole world needs the help of this 
power today. It’s a power that can end war. 
and put an end to international hatreds. In the 
next war I want to see the Church of the world 
arise and say to statesmen: ‘Stop! Don’t you 
dare to declare war among mankind. Men and 
women are doing their best everywhere to 
lead fine, decent, clean lives and thus put the 
world ahead and you shall not steer them into 
hatred! ’ 

“The Church has that power and I think 
some day it may find itself able to use it. The 
Church is wot like other institutions. They are 
human institutions. The Church is a Divine 
institution. I’m not a pacifist but I don’t be- 


148 BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


lieve that the state ever ought to draw Christ’s 
Church into the support of war anywhere in 
the world again. 

“TI believe in making the Church as a Divine 
institution the aggressive defender of all down- 
trodden men and women in all walks of life, 
and in all countries. They ought to be able to 
turn to the Church and seek assistance against 
oppression and injustice. 

“And the Church—well, it ought to Chris- 
tianise all human institutions so that they will 
not oppress men and women. 

“The institutions of men can be Christian- 
ised and this will not be a Christian world or a 
Christian era until institutions, as well as men 
and women, are Christianised.”’ 

It was fortunate I had that group of empty 
seats before me to strengthen the picture he 
drew of the vastness of the potential power of 
the Church; here, before me, were signs of the 
world activities of only one Protestant denomi- 
nation of one nation. It was hard to picture 
the potential massed power which might lie in 
all the Protestant denominations—and others, 
too—in all lands. 

Bishop McConnell sees this power; he wants 
to use it. 

He believes that if the Churches can bring the 
institutions of men to the mourner’s bench and 


er 


A PREACHER UNAFRAID 149 


Christianise them and put love and kindness 
into them and take out the hate and greed, that 
we will have a new kind of world very shortly, 
with fewer underdogs and more happy people 
in it. 

From what I had heard of “ McConnell” in 
the clubs of Mexico, I had expected to find a 
rough-and-ready man, self-made, perhaps. I 
found him far different, pronouncedly a student 
and a scholar. 

“No,” Bishop McConnell told me smiling, 
“T haven’t any story of early hardships in my 
life. I didn’t have to work my way through 
school, though my father was a Methodist cler- 
gyman in Ohio, when I was born. I borrowed 
the money from my mother to go through Ohio 
Wesleyan University but I paid her back later 
on. Somehow, we always had just about 
enough money to get along on, even if it was a 
clergyman’s home. I think I always knew I 
was going to go into the ministry. I never had 
any doubts about it.. I went to school for that 
purpose and when I graduated I went into the 
pulpit immediately.” 

He had four charges in Massachusetts towns, 
the last, in that state, being at Cambridge, 
where he preached to many Harvard students. 

While he was filling the pulpit of the famous 
New York Avenue Methodist church in Brook- 


150 BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 


lyn, Francis McConnell was elected president 
of De Pauw University. He was then only 
thirty-eight years old. 

It was his election as a bishop of the Method- 
ist Episcopal Church in 1912, at the age of 
forty-one, that took him out of the presidency 
of De Pauw. ‘Today, in his eleventh year as | 
a bishop, he is serving in the Pittsburgh dis- 
trict, where questions between capital and la- 
bour are acute. 

Did I find a radical in Bishop McConnell? 

I did not. To my astonishment he demands 
that capital and labour both help and permit the 
Church to be Christ-like in dealing with the 
problems between capital and labour. He asks 
aid for the Church from them! 

He suggests that capital and labour turn 
Christian. 

And has this bishop any hope of success in 
trying to move selfishness and meanness and 
greed and cruelty out of the institutions 
of men? 

“Tt can be done,” he told me simply. “It 
can be easily done. You know that people who 
are trying to do the same thing in life, who have 
a common object, are always friends. A man 
and wife may love each other but they love each 
other more deeply and surely when they are 
both interested in the common task of raising 


A PREACHER UNAFRAID 151 


their children. Married couples who do not 
have children are in danger, unless they find 
some common outside interest. Two men or 
two women can’t just say to each other, ‘ Let’s 
you and me be friends for life.’ Friendship 
doesn’t come that way. It comes through two 
persons being interested in common in some 
outside object. It is devotion to common tasks 
that makes fellowship between men and women. 

“All I ask is that America, its men and 
women and its institutions, all join in common 
in trying to be Christlike and in helping 
churches of America to be Christlike. 

“It’s by working with each other and by 
working with God at this common task that we 
can bring the world to Christ.” 

And then he added: “ You know people who 
“talk shop’ are always the best of friends. We 
want America—all of it—to ‘talk shop’; and 
we want ‘shop’ to be religion and an under- 
standing of a Christlike God.” 


Maki: 
. 


Ni) py 
i ts 


md 
Moet Ir 


VO 
MHA Si ay 





xX 
RUSSELL H. CONWELL 


AMERICA’S AMAZING MAN 


HAVE never heard more scathing criticism of 

mediocre preaching in American pulpits than in 
my conversation with Russell H. Conwell. In all 
fairness to this distinguished clergyman I must say, 
however, that he made no remarks in our conversa- 
tion criticising present-day preaching; at least, that 
was not the purpose of his remarks. However, in 
talks both with him and with Dr. Charles E. Jeffer- 
son, I discovered that there exists among great 
churchmen a knowledge that at least a certain por- 
tion of the preaching in American pulpits lacks 
merit in many different directions. Mentality, 
thought and good hard work is often missing. 

It was not until fairly late in life that Russell H. 
Conwell went into the ministry. When I asked him 
the reason, he told me that the pulpit held no attrac- 
tions for him because of the nature of the preaching 
which he usually heard. It was weak and unat- 
tractive; sermons were careless and full of faults. 
In fact, I gained the impression that no intellectual 
person could have a greater disdain for mediocrity 
in the pulpit than Dr. Conwell. It was this medio- 
crity, he told me, that had stood in his way when- 
ever he had considered entering the ministry. 


xX 
RUSSELL: H, CONWELL 


WENT into a sick room to see him. It 

was a gray, winter day; through the win- 

dow I saw the cold, winter Atlantic. I 
found him a huge bulk of aman. He seemed to 
have lost weight, for I noticed that his vest 
seemed a little too large and his coat hung 
loosely. I caught a tired look, just for a min- 
ute, in his eyes. 

And then in one minute, after a handshake— 
my biggish hand was lost in his—the sunshine 
was turned on. He smiled—and I was under 
the charm of Russell H. Conwell. It isa charm 
that has held millions of men and women in 
our land. 

He was not too old, even with his eighty-one 
years, or too weak in his convalescence, to be 
himself. And there is not a more amazing man 
in America than he. Five different famous 
writers have tried to write biographies about 
him and his astonishing life; he has always 
done more astonishing things, after the biog- 
raphies were written, than he had done before, 


155 


156 RUSSELL H. CONWELL 


thus making the books look like unfinished 
documents. 

There’s no use, in this article, of my trying 
to tell all he has done. You can find several 
books about him on the shelves of your public 
library. None of them is up to date; none, for 
instance, tells of his having received the annual 
award, in 1923, in Philadelphia, as a citizen 
who, during the year, had done the most for the 
city; none tells of the hospitals he has estab- 
lished since he was seventy-five years old. 

Right away, in talking with this man, you 
discover that life is no problem at all, if you 
can see it and live it as he has. There are no 
money worries, there are no questions of en- 
mities, there are no meannesses; there is 
nothing but sunshine and helpfulness. 

He’s in touch with Something that gives him 
power not only to live his own life happily and 
easily, but also to help hundreds and thousands 
of other human beings to live theirs. He makes 
you ashamed of ever having felt that there was 
anything hard or cruel about life. | 

I don’t believe that a thing has ever happened 
to this fine old man that he cannot smile about. 
Several million Americans who have heard his 
famous lecture, “ Acres of Diamonds,” will be- 
lieve me when I say this. 

As he talked I had a picture back in my mind. 


AMERICA’S AMAZING MAN 157 


It was night-time on the battlefield of Kenesaw 
Mountain. A huge hulk of a twenty-year-old 
boy captain lay on the ground. A stretcher- 
bearer, seeking for wounded, bent down to try 
to hear heart-beats. ‘“‘ He’s gone!” said the 
bearer; “his chest is blown open.’ They went 
away and left that pile of bleeding flesh in the 
darkness. You wouldn’t have thought that the 
world could expect anything more from that 
heap of misery. There it lay through the night. 

Up in a little town in Massachusetts a devout 
father and mother had been praying for this 
boy through all the months of fighting. He had 
run away from home twice. Finding his way 
to Yale University, he had worked in kitchens, 
and wherever else he could find odd jobs, to pay 
for his tuition. He had become very “ wise,” 
as youth becomes, The university had knocked 
all his religion into a cocked hat; he was regis- 
tered as an “ atheist.”’ And this looked like the 
end—this bleeding body on the battlefield. 

But there was life in that body. It was mo- 
tionless with weakness, but in the brain a 
mighty parade of thought was passing. All 
that his father and mother had taught him of 
religion and God came back to him. 

This big, smiling man who was talking to me 
had been that motionless mound of misery. 

““T was converted there that night, waiting 


158 RUSSELL H. CONWELL 


for some one to come and pick me up,” he told 
me. And he laughed with a glee that came 
from the heart. 

“The next morning, when some one found I 
was alive and took me to the hospital, I called 
_ for a chaplain and told him that, from then on, 
I was going to be a Christian.” 

What came out of that bleeding boy on 
that battlefield that night? For one thing, 
the great Temple University of Philadelphia; 
for another, three great hospitals; education 
for hundreds of young men and women, 
to which object, it is estimated, Dr. Conwell 
has donated more than $8,000,000 earned in 
lecturing. 

I had come to find out how Russell H. Con- 
well had entered the ministry. 

“T didn’t want to be a clergyman,” he told 
me. ‘‘ My father and mother had always told 
folks that I would go into the ministry some- 
time, but I had decided I wouldn't. I didn’t like 
parsons. I didn’t like the way they had 
preached and shouted and ranted. I had an 
idea, also, that it was a pretty poor way to make 
a living. 

“Well, after the Civil War I went out to 
Minneapolis. I went into business there and 
made money. I had a fine law practice; I did 
a big real estate business. I established the 


AMERICA’S AMAZING MAN 159 


Minneapolis Tribune and, with my left hand, 
I founded the Minneapolis Y. M. C. A. But I 
didn’t want to preach or to be a preacher.” 

Conwell was only twenty-two years old then. 
He proved himself a master at business and a 
moneymaker. ‘The ministry looked a long way 
off. Life was too pleasant and too easy. The 
governor of Minnesota sent him to Germany to 
be immigration agent for that state. 

“* Don’t let a single German immigrant start 
for Minnesota who gets drunk,’ was one of my 
orders from the governor,’ Dr. Conwell told 
me with a huge laugh. “ Well, the truth was 
that, in four years in Germany, I didn’t see a 
single immigrant who could have been dis- 
barred from Minnesota for that reason.” 

This job in Germany made the ministry seem 
even farther away. 

And then came still a better position for the 
young man—that of a traveling newspaper cor- 
respondent. I’ve been one myself, and if any 
young man can find a more thrilling occupation 
than that I have never heard of it. He traveled 
throughout the world for the New York T7i- 
bune. A good-sized weekly check came regu- 
larly, with expense money; his articles brought 
him reputation and fame in the newspaper 
world. This was a long, long way from being 
a clergyman. . 


160 RUSSELL H. CONWELL 


“And then I went to Boston to be managing 
editor of a famous newspaper,” he told me; “I 
was put in charge of the old Boston Traveler. 
I loved newspaper work.” 

But he could not stay out of the law. The 
money began to pour in as soon as he opened 
his law office. He began, also, to buy and sell 
real estate. | 

He was then thirty-six years old; that’s 
pretty late in life for a man to choose the min- 
istry as his life calling. 

“And how did you come to drop your busi- 
ness and go into the ministry?” I asked. 

“It all happened one forenoon,” he said with 
a hearty laugh. I cannot attempt to give my 
readers the charm of the story which this man 
told me within the next half hour. I do not 
know whether he has ever told it in any of his 
lectures. He smiled or laughed at every sen- 
tence, as if it were all a new and marvelous 
story—a thing that had just happened. 

“It was like this,’ he said. ‘“‘ Some men 
came into my real estate office in Boston one 
day to see me. They were members of a little, 
run-down Baptist church at Lexington, Massa- 
chusetts, where the battle of Lexington was 
fought in the Revolutionary War. They 
wanted me to sell their church; it had gone to 
pieces. But there was one difficulty. Some of 


AMERICA’S AMAZING MAN 161 


the folks in the little congregation were oppos- 
ing the sale; they wanted to hang on, if they 
could. These men wanted me, as a real estate 
expert, to come out to the church and tell the 
folks who were holding back that it would be 
advisable to sell. 

“Well, the next Sunday I went to the 
little church in Lexington. There wasn’t any 
preacher, so I got up in the pulpit before the 
seventeen people and tried to get them to agree 
on whether the church would be sold. They 
couldn’t agree. All of a sudden I found myself 
taking sides with the people who didn’t want 
to sell. 

“* Well, you all come here next Sunday, and 
we'll have a service of some sort,’ I said. ‘If 
there’s no one here to preach a sermon, [ll try 
to do it.’ 

“There were thirty people there the next 
Sunday, and I preached. It was my first ser- 
mon. The floor was so worn out that there 
were places where the congregation didn’t dare 
to step, for fear of falling through into the 
cellar. The front steps were so rickety that 
they were dangerous. 

“After my sermon I said to the congrega- 
tion, ‘ There will be services in this church next 
Sunday morning, as usual.’ 

“ Monday morning I didn’t go to business. 


162 RUSSELL H. CONWELL 


Instead, I got some nails and lumber and a 
hammer and a saw, and went to the church to 
fix the front steps. 

“T was a stranger in Lexington. My home 
was twenty-miles away. One of the leading 
citizens of the town, a noted Unitarian, passed 
the church while I was tinkering away at the 
steps. He stopped and watched me for a min- 
ute. Finally he said: ‘Good morning, friend. 
What are you doing there?’ 

“¢ Oh, I’m going to fix up the church.’ 

“<*What are you planning to do to it?’ he 
asked. | 

“« Well,’ I said, ‘I’m starting on the steps. 
They’re pretty shaky. When I get through 
here I’m going to lay a new floor inside. The 
old floor is pretty dangerous.’ I was half- 
joking, but still I think I must have meant it. 

““* Why, that old building isn’t worth tinker- 
ing with,’ said the man. 

“* Tt’s the best we've got,’ I said, ‘and we'll 
have to get along with it.’ 

“The man walked on a few steps, and I went 
on hammering. He went only a short distance 
and then he turned around and came back. 

“Are you really going to fix up that old 
church?’ he asked me. 

i Yespiliam;: I) saids) At least abmeoors 
to do the best I can with it.’ 


AMERICA’S AMAZING MAN 163 


“ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a 
bill. ‘ Here,’ he said, ‘ use this as far as it will 
go. I’m Unitarian, but good luck to you!’ 

“T thanked him and stuck the bill in my 
pocket and told him I would buy flooring with 
it, and went on with my work. 

“After a while the postmaster came by. I 
didn’t know him, of course, and he didn’t know 
me. He stopped and asked me what I was do- 
ing. I told him what I had told the first man. 

“* But you can’t keep that old Baptist church 
alive,’ he told me. ‘ This is a Unitarian town. 
The Baptists have all died out.’ 

“No, they haven’t,’ I told him. ‘I found 
seventeen of them here. And, besides, a Uni- 
tarian gave me a hundred dollars this morning 
to buy new flooring.’ 

“* What Unitarian gave you a hundred dol- 
lars?’ he asked. 

“ T told him. 

“* Well, that surprises me,’ said the post- 
master. ‘ He’s the firmest Unitarian in this 
town.’ 

“Don’t make any difference,’ I said. ‘He 
gave me a hundred dollars, and here’s the bill in 
my pocket.’ I pulled it out and showed it 
to him. 

“* Well, I declare,’ he said. ‘If that fellow 
was willing to give you a hundred dollars, I'll 


164 RUSSELL H. CONWELL 


give you the same. Are you the lawyer from 
Boston that preached here last Sunday?’ 

‘oT said’ was. <All right!) flere'stivous 
hundred dollars,’ he said. And he gave me the 
money. I stuck it in my pocket and thanked 
him, and went on working.” 

Right here the big man burst into a hearty 
laugh. 

“That morning’s work resulted in collecting 
four thousand five hundred dollars for that 
church. We got it fixed up, and finally we built 
a fine, stone church. It’s running yet. 

“Tt looked as if I would have to be the pas- 
tor of the church; so I closed up my law office 
in Boston, dropped the real estate business and 
was ordained a Baptist minister. That’s how I 
went into the ministry.” 

Dr. Conwell remained in the Lexington 
church until it was on its feet. After that he 
didn’t seem to be needed. 

Not being needed, I imagine, has been the 

one and only fear of his life. 
_ In that little church in Lexington his salary 
hadn’t supported him; he had been worse off 
than the preachers who lived on pittance sala- 
ries ; he had. been forced to live on money which 
he had saved. 

He had about fifty-five thousand dollars left 
when he heard of a little Baptist church in 


AMERICA’S AMAZING MAN 165 


Philadelphia that needed help mightily. The 
building consisted only of a basement. | 

He went to Philadelphia, took charge of the 
Grace Baptist church, put a considerable portion 
of his fifty-five thousand dollars into it, col- 
lected more, and, within a few years, he had 
raised the largest Protestant church of its day 
in the United States—the famous Baptist Tem- 
ple, with seats for three thousand five hundred. 

_His church was always filled. He was there 
every Sunday. Between times he was lecturing. 
He has given his famous lecture, “ Acres of 
Diamonds,” over six thousand times. He has 
never. taken one cent of the proceeds for him- 
self. After deducting traveling expenses, he 
sends a check for the remainder to some college 
president or, perhaps, directly to some student, 
to help pay for an education. 

Possibly Dr. Conwell knows how many hun- 
dreds of young men and young women he has 
helped through American universities, though I 
imagine he doesn’t. Of the eight million and 
more dollars which he has taken in and 
given away, a considerable portion has gone 
for the education of young people in various 
universities. 

It’s acting Christianity, not talking it, that 
counts with this man. When he does talk, in 
his pulpit or on the lecture platform, he is only 


166 RUSSELL H. CONWELL 


telling people how to act Christianity ; he’s only 
telling them that talking doesn’t count. 

You and I have been told, many times, from 
many pulpits, to act like Christians. But this, 
to me, has always been a puzzling generality, 
too vague and indefinite for concrete results. 

Dr. Conwell can tell you how to act like a 
Christian; his instructions are very definite: 

“Find the nearest person who needs your 
help and give it to him right away, in the name 
of Christ.” 

Here’s how the great Temple University, 
through which over one hundred and twenty- 
five thousand students have passed, was started 
by Dr. Conwell: 

A young man came to Dr. Conwell and asked 
him where he could study, of evenings, for the 
ministry. Dr. Conwell knew of no school that 
could meet this need. 

“Come to me next Saturday evening and 
we'll begin lessons,’ he told the young man. 
“We'll fix things up some way.” 

Saturday evening the young man came with 
two other young men who wanted to study, of 
evenings, for the ministry. Within a few 
weeks the group had grown to a dozen. Dr. 
Conwell secured a classroom. ‘The class grew 
until daily sessions became necessary. Pretty 
soon a building went up to house the classes. 


AMERICA’S AMAZING MAN 167 


Today there are about ten thousand students in 
the various courses. 

And the three hospitals Dr. Conwell has 
founded—they started simply like all of the 
other mighty projects of this simple man. 

A member of his congregation was ill and 
needed a nurse. Dr. Conwell rented a few 
rooms, put the patient there, with a nurse, and 
then put more patients into the cramped quar- 
ters, as needy cases came to his attention. 
After a time he needed more room for his sick 
friends among the poor. So the great Samari- 
tan Hospital, of Philadelphia, was founded, and 
also the Garretson Hospital. 

Now a third hospital of his founding is under 
way. It will be known as the Greatheart Hos- 
pital, named after the character in Pilgrim’s 
Progress. It will be for women and children. 

At eighty-one I found him full of plans for 
seeing it running at full blast. 

Between times Dr. Conwell has written books 
—twenty or more of them. He has written 
biographies of some of his heroes—Garfield, 
Bayard Taylor and Charles Haddon Spurgeon. 

At eighty-one I found him between sermons 
and lectures, writing a biography of John 
Wanamaker. 

Life is simple when you love everybody, as 
this man does. As you talk to him you feel 


168 RUSSELL H. CONWELL 


that, if there’s no more sunshine in Heaven 
than there has been for him here, he will not be 
disappointed ; he’ll tell you that a life filled with 
love will be filled with as much happiness as a 
human being can stand. 

Did you ever stop to think what a wonderful 
place this world would be if tomorrow morning 
every last man and woman of us were to roll up 
sleeves and start out to fight for the other fel- 
low ; to see that the other fellow got all that was 
coming to him, and even more? 

If we could only forget ourselves and turn 
“self-ishness ’’ into “ you-ishness’’ we could 
make another place of our world. We've all 
thought this; I have. But I’ve always found a 
stumbling block. 

“Who would start it? And what would 
happen to him, if he started it and the rest of 
the folks didn’t? He’d lose everything he had 
and starve to death.” 

I was wrong there. I made that discovery in 
that sick room beside the dreary ocean that 
gray, winter day. 

Russell H. Conwell is a man who has lived 
this way all his life. 

He hasn’t a million dollars; in fact, I under- 
stand he hasn’t any dollars; rarely more than 
one hundred. But he can look you straight in 
the face and say, “I have thousands and thou- 


AMERICA’S AMAZING MAN 169 


sands of friends, and not one single enemy in 
all the world.” 

And all this started, simply, in that pitiful 
heap of a wounded Union soldier, at Kenesaw 
Mountain—there, and back in a home of prayer 
in New England. 


Pag Re 


oe 


hike 
bi 


xeN 
1 ROR 
i Ce ee 


fi eon iD 
faith 

PRA 

iy 





XI 
G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


A KNIGHT FIGHTING FOR THE BIBLE 


[! would be useless for me to try to tell what kind 

of a preacher G. Campbell Morgan is. He has 
conquered the Protestantism of Great Britain and 
America. The two great capitals of London and 
New York are his, so that when he preaches in 
either city the crowds that go to hear are too great 
for any church auditorium. He is beyond any 
denomination. 

A great compelling English-speaking Protestant 
preacher ; that’s what I make out of him; a preacher 
too big in his views to be enclosed within any 
ecclesiastical fence. 

But how did he come to be this kind of a 
preacher? I’m asking this question about him just 
as I might ask a similar question about any man 
who has reached success in his profession—a great 
banker, a great builder, a great surgeon. What 
were the things he did or the things that happened 
to him that took him to the heights? What is in 
him that makes him different? What is the origin 
of his power? 


XI 
G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


HAT kind of a man is behind the 
preacher; that’s what I wanted to 
know about G. Campbell Morgan. 

It was raining in Baltimore that Sunday af- 
ternoon; what with the rain and the damp of 
the ocean the fish of Chesapeake Bay might 
almost have swum in the air about the tops of 
the automobiles and busses. You had to look 
through what seemed to be almost solid water 
to see the outlines of the buildings. It was un- 
speakably dreary. 

It was all right for me. I was lodged ina 
huge chair in the marble lobby of the great 
Belvidere Hotel, with a good book. Whenever 
the revolving door at the entrance made a stir 
most of us in the lobby looked up from what 
we were reading to look at the latest drenched 
newcomers. The liveried doormen, in heavy, 
white rubber raincoats, took dripping umbrel- 
las and set them in the rack, and liveried bell- 
boys and porters seized the baggage of dripping 
newcomers and helped them to take off their 


173 


174 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


dripping coats. If there is a lonelier spot in all 
this world than a hotel lobby on a Sunday after- 
noon I’ve never seen it and I don’t want to see 
it. They are always rayless places. 

I was waiting for the great preacher, G. 
Campbell Morgan. The town of Baltimore was 
talking about him; there were stories in the 
Sunday morning papers about him. He had 
come to town to preach twice a day for two 
weeks. Various churches of the town were 
adjusting their schedules of services to suit the 
Morgan program. This rainy afternoon he 
was preaching to a vast audience, but I sat at 
the hotel waiting. I hadn’t come to Baltimore 
to hear a preacher but to talk to a man. 

So I sat there in the lobby, reading and 
watching the revolving door that led out into 
the rain. Finally, a great car rolled up. The 
doorman hurried out to the curb carrying his 
huge umbrella. He opened the car door and 
out into the wetness stepped a tall gaunt 
Englishman. You couldn’t have missed his 
Englishness. As he came through the revolvy- 
ing door I noted it—the narrow prominent 
nose, the long neck, the low, loose collar and 
the shaggy brows. In an instant I knew him 
for the great Morgan. The porters knew him, 
too; he lived there. One of them tried to take 
his overcoat. 


PREACHER TO ALL CREEDS 175 


I met him at the clerk’s desk, where | heard 
him asking for me. 

“I’m soaking wet,” he said, laughing lightly. 
“Tt’s not the rain but I’m always wet with per- 
spiration after I preach. Let’s have some tea. 
I’m an Englishman, you know.” He laughed 
again. I was to find that he’s nearly always 
laughing or smiling; that he believes life, 
whether it’s lived in England or America, in 
small homes or amid the excitement and luxury 
of travel, is a very pleasant and worthwhile 
thing. It was with a charming smile, not 
devoid of pride, that he presented me to his 
daughter, who is his almost constant compan- 
ion these days. She spoke with the soft accent 
of a Southern schoolgirl. Her home, for sev- 
eral years, has been in Athens, Georgia. 
America has not permitted Morgan to return 
to England for the past five years! It may 
never permit him to return home. 

But Miss Morgan is English, too, What 
came next proved it. I have lived in England 
and I know. 

“Tea, please,’ Dr. Morgan said to the 
waiter in the luxurious dining room. “ Do 
you have yours strong?’ he asked me. “ Mild, 
please,” I answered. He smiled. “ Put one 
bag of tea in his pot and two in ours,” he 
ordered. 


176 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


Three small pots of tea the waiter brought. 
The Morgan pots were double strength. I 
poured hot water in mine, but the cup of tea 
which the great preacher raised to his lips threw 
off a thick rich vapour of tannin—the very 
smell of London. 

“There! That’s better,” he said, after a 
deep draught. I noticed that he still wore his 
overcoat, though the check boy at the door had 
captured mine. Dr. Morgan shrugged his 
shoulders in his coat and said, “ There! That 
will take care of the dampness. And now what 
can | tell your?” 

“T came to ask you,” I said, “ how you hap- 
pened to be a preacher? What started you in 
that direction? ”’ 

“To this day,” he said, snapping off his 
words, decisively, and waving his head, “I 
don’t know. I don’t know. I always knew I 
was going to be a preacher.” 

“But,” I said, “most people can point out 
some certain incident, some certain moment, 
that sent them in any certain direction.” 

5; Les, L know,” he. said.) 1 can: find imost 
of the big points in my life, but I can’t point to 
anything that directed me to the ministry. I 
always knew I was going to preach.” 

“Can you remember your first sermon?” I 
asked. 


PREACHER TO ALL CREEDS 177 


“Why, yes, of course. I was thirteen years 
of age. I preached in a Wesleyan schoolroom. 
You know in England laymen preach in little 
chapels or in cottage meetings. My father was 
a Baptist minister and when I was thirteen 
years old I preached my first lay sermon.”’ 

He stopped to drink tea. Then he turned to 
Miss Morgan. 

“But I had had practice before that,” he 
said, with a broad smile. ‘‘I can remember 
preaching when I was six years old. I used to 
make my sister’s dolls sit in meeting and listen 
to me preach. 

“You see,” he said, turning to me, “TI al- 
ways knew I was going to preach. And it was 
the same way with my conversion. I know I 
have been converted, but I don’t know when. 
I was born again, but conversion must have 
come to me before I was entirely self-conscious, 
before I fully realised that there was such a 
person as myself. 

“ Of course my home surroundings were ex- 
tremely religious. Why, I never knew ’—and 
again he waved his head from side to side, with 
each word—‘“a more austere or Puritanical 
man than my father. He wouldn’t permit 
Shakespeare in the home; he never read a novel 
in his life. They were of the theatre and of 
the world. | 


178 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


“The Bible was the book in our home; 
prayer and hymns and discussion of the Bible 
was part of our daily life. Indeed,” he said, 
“religion was the life of the household; every 
minute and every act was regulated by it.” 

And George Morgan went to school at home ; 
he didn’t get out into the big world by going to 
school with the boys and girls of the little town 
of Tetbury, in the Cotswold hills of Glouces- 
tershire, where he was born. A teacher, care- 
fully selected by the austere father, came to the 
home; whatever religious instruction the boy 
did not receive from his parents he received 
from this tutor. 

“TI wasn’t strong and healthy,’ Dr. Morgan 
told me, “ so I studied at home.” 

Again he told me how indescribably strict his 
father had been with him. And he didn’t speak 
of this strictness quite approvingly, either. In- 
stead, he explained it to me. 

In the England of the Morgans you know 
your ancestors; family life doesn’t go by per- 
sons and individuals; it goes by generations. 

In the Morgan family, when George Mor- 
gan’s father was born, it was time for some- 
body to be strict. The family was not a rich 
one but it was an old one, as all families of 
those parts were. And the Morgan family was 
on the down grade. 


PREACHER TO ALL CREEDS 179 


Dr. Morgan spoke to Miss Morgan as well 
as to me, when he told of the family fortunes. 

“My great grandfather was a yeoman 
farmer,” he said. ‘Do you know what a 
yeoman farmer means? It means one who 
is not a tenant but one who owns his own 
farm. It was a good farm, too. But his 
son drank up the farm—literally drank it up. 
He was my grandfather. He became a shep- 
herd on the land which he had once owned. 

“T loved my grandfather, though. We all 
did. Everybody loved him; there were some 
fine things about him. But things went hard 
for my father; from a boy of eight he was 
tossed out and had to make his own way. 

“He had the choice of going his father’s 
direction or going the other way. And he went 
the other way, just as earnestly as his father 
had gone his own way. It was a careful, God- 
fearing home my father wanted and he had it. 
That was the atmosphere in which I was 
raised.” 

You can almost feel sorry, even yet, for that 
hard-studying little Morgan boy, in that strict 
Puritanical home, shut off from the big outside 
world, playing church with the dolls. But 
that’s the way men are made. Big men of any 
kind, in any profession, may be made of ordi- 
nary human material, but they must be cast in 


180 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


special molds, under great heat and high pres- 
sure. Morgan’s father, true to his lights, was 
getting ready to give something to the world. 
In plenty of time the big outside world would 
take the boy. 

‘“T was trained to be a teacher,” Dr. Morgan 
told me, “ but as soon as I did go out to take the 
head mastership of a very rich Jewish collegiate 
school I lost my faith. 

‘“‘T spent two miserable years. I lost every- 
thing. I was utterly bewildered and distracted. 
I couldn’t get heads or tails of life.” 

The word “agnostic ’’ had just been coined. 
I shall tell later on in this chapter of its in- 
fluence on Morgan’s life. The idea was seeping 
through the schools that men couldn’t know re- 
ligious truths with scientific exactness ; Darwin- 
ism was new and fresh. Religion was rocking 
everywhere in the minds of school men, young 
and old, and it rocked and tottered in Mor- 
gan’s mind. 

“ At last I made up my mind that the only 
hope for me was in the Bible,’ Dr. Morgan 
continued. “I made up my mind that I wasn’t 
going to depend on what other people found in 
the Bible; I was going to find whatever was 
there for myself. What I got out of the Bible 
was going to be my own. And so I stopped 
reading books about the Bible and began to read 


PREACHER TO ALL CREEDS 181 


the Bible itself. I read it and read and read. I 
studied it, with infinite pains. As soon as I did 
this I saw the light again. I was back on 
the path. 

“For seven years I didn’t open a_ book 
that told about the Bible. My book was 
the Bible itself. I’ve studied that book all 
my life and I’ve only begun to discover what’s 
ites, 

Then Dr. Morgan began to preach. He was 
ordained in the Congregational church, though 
his family had been Baptist. Though his first 
charge was small, his fame reached great Lon- 
don within a few years. He did not have to 
wait long for the big outside world to call him. 
London wanted him. 

The intellectuals were pounding away at the 
Rock of Ages; “ higher criticism” was alarm- 
ing the leaders of all the great denominations ; 
they seemed helpless against it. | 

Into London sprang this tall, thin-faced, 
fighting man from the Cotswold farm country, 
to defend his Book. Now all those years of 
Puritanical training counted for something; 
now all his study of that Book stood him in 
good stead, like the long, slow, training of an 
athlete. He was like a knight in armour for 
the Bible. In the famous New Court chapel in 
London and in Westminster chapel, he met the 


182 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


challenges of the intellectuals—and hurled chal- 
lenges of his own. 

“ Religion is of the heart, not the brain,” he 
cried, and then he used his own magnificent 
brain to prove it. 

Of course America heard of him. While he 
was at the height of his fame in London he 
was brought to America during one summer. 
Dwight L. Moody took him to the Northfield 
Bible conference. Year after year, thereafter, 
he worked with Moody at Northfield. 

“Forty-three times I’ve crossed the Atlan- 
tic,” he told me. . ‘I know America as well as 
I know England, I think.” 

And America knows G. Campbell Morgan as 
well as England does. Indeed, Morgan is a 
preacher of the entire English-speaking world. 
As a preacher he does not belong to any certain 
country any more than he definitely belongs to 
any certain creed. 

It is a fact that there is not a preacher any- 
where in the world who has a wider audience; 
I have not encountered any preacher who had 
a fame so nearly world-wide as his. 

Where does his strength lie? 

The secret of his power and success goes back 
to that one word “agnostic.” A new kind of 
atheism got a start in the world just about the 
time that G. Campbell Morgan was beginning to 


PREACHER TO ALL CREEDS 183 


preach. It stirred him to action. The scien- 
tists in England had turned a broadside on old- 
fashioned religion. Of course there were plenty 
of “infidels ’’ in the world at the time. These 
old-fashioned “ infidels ’’ were wont to sit back 
and say “ There is no God.” ‘Their arguments 
were easy for even ordinary clergymen to at- 
tack. But the scientists were more subtle. 
They were very careful to make no declarations 
as to the existence of a God. They merely said, 
“We may not be able to prove that there is no 
God, but, on the other hand, no one can prove 
that there is a God. We don’t know. We are 
agnostics.” They spent little time in trying to 
prove or believe or even disbelieve anything. 
They tried to put religion at a standstill. 

It became very fashionable in those days, in 
intellectual circles, to be an “agnostic.” To 
take this pose was almost a mode among uni- 
versity students. “I don’t know and no man 
can know ”’; that was the subtle declaration of 
the unbelievers of Morgan’s early days. 

“ A man can know.” That was G, Campbell 
Morgan’s ringing declaration. He not only in- 
sisted that there was a God but that any man, 
by reading the Bible, could prove as definitely to 
himself that there is a God as any man could 
prove scientific facts to himself by reading 
scientific books. 


184 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


“ Agnosticism” as a fashion and a modish 
pose became extremely popular. It was dis- 
cussed in the press of London as a popular 
subject; the word became almost a slang 
phrase. 

It is one of the romances of the modern his- 
tory of Protestantism, the early and even the 
present career of G. Campbell Morgan. His 
appearance in London created a sensation. He 
was an odd-looking, tall young man. He was 
cultured and brilliant. If he had come to Lon- 
don to enter the lists in the field of politics 
instead of religion he would certainly have 
made a brilliant mark. But he would have at- 
tracted no more attention than he did as a 
fighting preacher. There was no better-dressed 
man in London, I have been told by Londoners 
of his day. His hair was long and wavy. He 
loved flowers and often wore a flower in the 
lapel of his very correct coat. There was some- 
thing dramatic about him. He was meeting 
the brilliant scientific and social minds of En- 
gland on their own ground. He did not scorn 
to use their tools of beauty, literature, poetry 
and culture. » 

English society, I have been told, found a 
place for him, and kept it open, until it discov- 
ered that this striking young preacher from the 
provinces was not a poser who was dramatically 


PREACHER TO ALL CREEDS 185 


fighting the cultured scientists of his day, but 
that, in plain terms, he was in deadly earnest 
and that he had come to London to “ stand up 
for God” and “ for God’s Book.” 

It was not play with G. Campbell Morgan, 
his assault on the “ agnosticism ”’ of his day; it 
was the hardest kind of work and of fighting. 

Just about this time someone rediscovered the 
fact that Pontius Pilate had asked the question, 
“What is truth?” People who didn’t know 
anything else about the Bible and couldn’t quote 
anything from it were able glibly to quote 
Pontius Pilate. In this respect Pontius Pilate 
became, for a time, one of the leading and most 
important of all Biblical characters. It became 
the fashion in London universities and London 
drawing rooms to ask that question of. Pilate’s 
and then sit back and wait for the other fellow 
to answer it. It was supposed to be a flooring 
question. It was sort of a drawing-room game. 
If the other fellow couldn’t answer the question 
“What is truth?”’ then you, as the asker, had 
forced him to prove that there was, indeed, no 
such thing as truth. Truth was an indefinite, 
unknowable thing; what might be true today 
would not be true tomorrow. Truth was too 
slippery and uncertain a thing, no matter how 
cultured an intellectual he might be, for any 
human being to try to grasp. If you were 


186 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


really wise you didn’t claim that any such thing 
as truth existed; you merely said: “ I’m one of 
these new-style agnostics. JI don’t know and 
I’m smart enough to admit it.” 

It was into this intellectual game that G. 
Campbell Mergan plunged when he went to 
London. He became more than a popular 
preacher; he became the hero of great numbers 
of bewildered British folks who were trying to 
hold on to their religion in the midst of the 
storm. 

He had nothing to stand on but the Bible. 
The amount of study and research he devoted 
to that was fabulous; he knew that Book down 
to its commas; he knew Bible times and their 
customs. None of his scientific enemies knew 
their books better than he knew his. 

It was his championship of truth and of the 
Bible that prevented Morgan from becoming a 
pastor in the ordinary sense of the word. He 
has remained a preacher all his life. He made 
his own niche and found his own_ peculiar 
duties in the world of Protestantism. 

The work that Morgan accomplishes today is 
stupendous. I saw a book containing his en- 
gagements for six months; his traveling, during 
that time, had taken him to preaching engage- 
ments in cities at opposite ends of the country 
and into Canada. During his stays of a week 


PREACHER TO ALL CREEDS 187 


or more in a city he preaches twice daily, some- 
times seven days a week. 

Twelve sermons a week, for weeks on end, 
has been an ordinary duty with him for 
many years. 

As a writer his work is overwhelming. 
There are many famous popular writers who 
do not achieve the literary success with the best 
of their books that Morgan achieves with his. 
He has written over thirty books. Some of 
them, though written more than twenty years 
ago, have as steady a sale as any standard work 
of science. And many of his books are solid 
ones, too. ‘They are text-books on the Bible 
and there is every indication that they will have 
as solid footing with coming generations as 
they have had with the people of Morgan’s 
own day. 

I have talked with great and famous pastors 
who have built great churches which they will 
leave behind them as their monuments. 

Morgan’s monument must find its pedestal in 
the hearts of men and women. He has held on 
to truth through a mighty storm when science 
was raging at its wildest. It is safe to say, with 
all reverence, that this man has played a great 
part in helping to keep the Bible anchored in 
the minds of the men and women of his time 
throughout the English-speaking world. 


188 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


“What an agnostic he would have made!” 
an old London clergyman once exclaimed. 
“Thank God he wasn’t one.” 


And now in writing of G. Campbell Morgan, 
I come to my last word. Often enough, in this 
book, I have said that I was. a mere reporter, an 
unchurched man-on-the-street, doing my job as 
a writer, of interviewing and studying some of 
the great preachers of our day. I have gone 
about this task with an open mind, with no 
cause to support, no points to prove, no propa- 
ganda of any sort to devise and distribute. 

It was inevitable that I should draw some 
conclusions about the Church, as an institution, 
from my contact with these Church leaders, and 
about the institution of the ministry. If now, 
after this experience with preachers, covering 
something more than a year, I were asked to 
preach about preachers, I would gladly take this 
powerful man, G. Campbell Morgan, as the sub- 
ject of my text. I have more than a suspicion 
that I have not been entirely without a Guide in 
this past year’s work. If I needed anything 
more to confirm my belief in the Help I have 
received than the ease and facility with which I 
have encountered these busy men, coming from 
all parts of the country and the pleasure and 
great satisfaction which I have experienced in 


PREACHER TO ALL CREEDS 189 


writing about them, it would be the fact that it 
was ordained that G. Campbell Morgan should 
be the last of the men I should interview. 

The pity of it, that there should be so many 
creeds in the Protestant Church of America! 
I leave my task with that thought uppermost in 
my mind. I see the Protestant Church marred 
by as many creedal cracks as an old china plate. 

True, the plate is whole. But I did not real- 
ise that fact until, after talking with clergymen 
of various denominations I came, at the end of 
my task, to G. Campbell Morgan. It was with 
bewilderment and great disappointment that I 
came to the day of meeting him. To me, until 
I encountered him, the Protestant Churches in 
America seemed almost a broken and hopeless 
mass of denominationalism. 

But in Morgan I found a great Protestant 
preacher, a free lance within the realm of Prot- 
estantism. JI found a man incredibly busy in 
speaking and writing to men and women of all 
Protestant denominations. I found that he has 
good welcome in all the Protestant denomina- 
tions of America, Canada and England and 
when the great audiences assemble to hear him 
they are made up of folks who come, without 
urging, from the churches of all the Protestant 
denominations of the community. 

To me, the wonder of the man is, that he 


190 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 


proves so clearly that anyone, even an outsider, 
can see it, how much the Protestant Churches 
and creeds have in common, in their funda- 
mental beliefs, and how unnecessary it is to lace 
and interlace the surface of Protestantism with 
schisms. 

If my son, in the year 1950, were to be asked, 
as a writer, to interview some of the great 
preachers of his day, as I have, will he meet 
fewer denominational preachers and more Prot- 
estant preachers than I have? 

I believe he will; I believe that the creeds 
within Protestantism are more shell-like and 
fragile than appears on the surface. Some of 
these ministers I have written about in this book 
were born in one creed and preach now, in 
another. 

Ask me at the end of my work what con- 
clusion stands out in my mind and I must say, 
“IT have found plenty of signs that the Prot- 
estant Churches of America will one day be one 
great Church. The uselessness and the pity of 
today’s schisms and doctrinal conflicts will, of 
themselves, bring about a great consolidation, 
which our children, if not we ourselves, 
shall see.”’ 


\e hess 
a ve y 7 lig 
pM 
un eat ip 
bai, 


nie 


4'( Wd 
U7 Gee 


hos 
au 
What 











be 











